Biography
Born in Huddersfield (Yorkshire), Steve Helm is based in Glasgow and is a studio holder at Clydebrae Studios, Govan. He graduated from Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art in 2008 and was awarded the Professional Practice Award for his degree show.
Artists Statement
At this stage I believe that I am building upon a mode of inquiry into how I take responsibility for practicing as an artist. I have come to realise that Art, for me, represents a resistance to economic, cultural, social and religious facts and that being an artist involves taking responsibility for a kind of disobedience when producing artwork both publicly and privately. My intention as an artist is to let go of the notion of outcome and possession and to commit myself to forms of action that lend themselves to surrender, presence, and latent excess. I attempt to use sculpture and installations as platforms or vessels that attests to these headless forms of action, that attend the hand, and also become tools for engaging with and emancipating myself from facts. I use wood and metal to try and compose formal structures and shapes that are designed for the display and/or to facilitate actions involving base/excess materials such as clay and soil.
Over the last year my work has been informed by George Bataille’s theory of l’informe (the formless), In which he spoke of the tasks of words instead of their meaning and required that each thing have its own form and that what formless designates “has no rights in any sense, and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm.” This began to trigger a shift towards, what Bataille termed, a ‘heterological’ approach to making work, which is, in essence, the science of what is entirely ‘other’.
