SUSTAINABLE ART from Helen Musselwhite

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.