Almost a decade after becoming the Turner’s second youngest winner, the artist talks about her dazzling new opera sets, her paper bag collection – and the sadness she felt when her work was wildly misinterpreted
‘I
don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard,” says Helen Marten. “I’ve literally not taken a day off for four months.” The artist is talking about 30 Blizzards, a two-hour opera for which she was commissioned, by Art Basel Paris and the fashion brand Miu Miu, to write the libretto and design the staging. Featuring 30 main characters – named things like The Mother, The Baker, The Asphalt, The Forest – and a chorus collectively called Dust, the whole piece moves from “deepest night through all of these iterations of the day – dawn, afternoon, then back to deepest night”. It will take place in a space 200 metres long, with the audience able to mingle with the performers throughout.
It sounds exhausting, but Marten, by her own admission, is “a total workaholic”. During our lengthy chat, she repeatedly darts off to leaf through a file, pull up a video, glance through a book, or play a voice memo – talking all the while.
The artist, seated in her London studio, pulls up images of the multiheight set she has designed for the opera and plays rough edits of the five new video works has written and shot. In one, we hear a girl say: “Today, I hopped around my room on one foot and then backwards on the other foot. Do you believe in ghosts, Lupo?” Even in this unfinished state, being shown the work feels a lot like being made tiny and placed – like a figure in a doll’s house – into a Helen Marten installation.
