SUSTAINABLE ART
Helen Musselwhite joins the James Cropper Wainwright Prize as this year’s featured artist. She is a creator of enchanting paper artistry, forging flora and fauna creations with her beguiling craft. There is a humbleness to the way she crafts out of one raw, natural, and modest material; it is a pastoral resourcefulness, an offering back to nature. Creating inherently shares a link to nature - to things grown and made.
Using her paper-illustrations to portray the natural world, what she does is stunningly similar to the work of nature writers. Paper, it seems, is a remarkable and universal way to communicate our devotion to the planet. Helen’s work speaks loudly, and with colour, to the sentiments of the James Cropper Wainwright Prize.
Helen grew up on a farm in the countryside. It is a childhood affinity with nature that has so inspired Helen’s work in adult life and she harvests those memories in order to design and make.
"As you’ll gather from my work, a lot of my inspiration comes from the British countryside. The beauty of it never ceases to amaze me. I’m delighted to be part of the 2022 James Cropper Wainwright Prize. It’s a dream project, working in an area I love from both a visual and a literary point of view. I’m very inspired by the natural world and often listen to audio books about it whilst working and walking in the countryside around my studio."Helen Musselwhite, Paper Artist:
What Helen really loves about working with paper is that you start off with a flat piece, and you can do anything you want with it. The sky is the limit, it’s just down to your creativity. It’s infinite the different things that you can do with a sheet of paper.
The key things that she looks for when selecting paper to work with, is number one, colour. That’s really important to Helen. Liking smooth paper for certain things, and texture is also really good for painting onto the paper. Sometimes needing thicker paper that will be the base of a piece of work, and then a thinner, lighter weight paper to do something that has a lot of detail. It might be some folding, scoring or curling. She also like to do a lot of stencilling, so she's looking for paper that is quite robust to take the paint, but also easy for her to cut out as well.
It is really important for us to use papers that are sustainable, that have a provenance to them, so we know where they’ve come from. It adds to the work, Helen takes a lot of care with what she does and likes to know that the manufacturer of the paper has taken care as well. And, she is carrying on that care and passing it on.
"I think art’s really important for helping people connect with nature. You know it might be a birthday card, it might be a book cover, it might be something in a film that might inspire them to notice things, to appreciate the natural world we all live in and that we need to really look after."
