Helen Acklam:  I am a Welsh multidisciplinary artist from the Garw Valley, Bridgend, now based in Bristol.

what it is to be there

Instagram:   @h.a.pics

My practice is a site-specific exploration of grief and identity and the connections between personal experience, community and place. The work included in this exhibition explores these connections and the liminal space I occupy today as a mother without children. 

What it is to be there: I have been working at the site of my baby’s grave in the Garw Valley.  This has led to a forensic and spiritual connection with the earth and a bodily understanding of motherhood and grief.  Working with living materials, performance and site-specificity, the work is rooted in the landscape, sharing stories and revealing connections between personal experience and social, political and geological implications of this post-industrial, relict landscape where I grew up. 

Connecting my body with the materials that make up this landscape, I have had a growing sense of interconnectedness and how I have been shaped by this land. This turn outwards has created a strong sense of place in my practice, and opened up opportunities to collaborate with other artists and researchers.  Sharing work and talking with the group, over this period of preparation for the exhibition, has helped me acknowledge the complex mix of feelings surrounding grief.  

Shafted:  an empty cage or vessel, contains fired clay, formed by squeezing in the hand whilst thinking and talking about some of these feelings.