A pelican landed in the water as I sat waist deep – it was both arresting and terrifying as it circled, staring with a side gaze. It was drawn to me but didn’t want to touch me. Moving from a gentle bobbing to the roar of ascending wings the Pelican flew across air – in a place I had only ever imagined – and then dove next to my body – time after time. In my father’s Jamaican waters looking to the skyline, and Cuba, the place of his birth, I was scared – yet exhilarated by the grace of the ungainly body with the razor-sharp bill. This repeated action; a scene of both survival and killing all at once. I sat motionless – a bystander to the onslaught yet somehow part of the play.
Kate MacGarry presents Helen Cammock’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition’s title is taken from a recent body of relief prints produced during a visit to Jamaica, where the artist’s father grew up. Responding to the rhythms of a sonic and haptic geography of place; wind, sea, and sound are intertwined with thoughts on displacement and reckoning in what Cammock describes as ‘the liminal suspension’ of her diasporic identity.
She considers how her body-as-lens replicates and reactivates ideas, meaning, emotions – ventriloquising histories’ whispers; building a Black feminist intersectional epistemology moving across archives, stories, dialogue, imagination, loss, and heritage. The material starting point in Cammock’s process of making is often voice and writing, her ‘audible fingerprint’ forming the basis for moving image, performance and wall-based works, as well as hand-crafted objects that embody both personal and structural narrative. Scripts are woven through many registers of voice, while objects respond to specific events that speak of geographical, historical and generational transference of experience. This exhibition operates as an environment bringing into a set of relations Cammock’s coalescence of ideas and materials.
| Duration | 12 September 2025 - 25 October 2025 |
| Times | Tuesday-Saturday 1:00 - 17:00 |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Kate MacGarry |
| Address | 27 Old Nichol Street, London, E2 7HR |
| Contact | 020 7613 0515 / mail@katemacgarry.com / www.katemacgarry.com |