Bluebutter Idles

A sculptor who continually shifts between two- and three-dimensional modes, Helen Marten makes videos and wall-based works as well as free-standing sculptures. Speaking about her sculptural assemblages, Marten describes her approach as ‘getting to the peripheries of a place – to somewhere on the edges – where things can’t quite be named with certainty.’ She goes on to say, ‘what I’m aiming at is the triggering of an avalanche of overlaps, a piling-up of absurdities.’

'Bluebutter Idles' resembles a ‘dumpster, trough or cradle’. Its deceptively familiar form is a repository for an elaborate sculptural tableau, in which organic and inorganic items form an oblique ‘archaeological anagram’. Marten is interested in the point at which diagrammatic clarity breaks down. According to the artist, her sculptures are ‘vehicles for gathering sociological dust’ which refuse the viewer the satisfaction of a resolving punch line.