‘Winning the Turner Prize made me fiercer’: Helen Martin on the negative side of the award – and her epic new work | art

‘I “I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard before. I literally didn’t have a day off for four months,” says Helen Martin. The artist talks about 30 Blizzards, a two-hour opera for which she was commissioned by Art Basel Paris and the fashion label Miu Miu, to write the libretto and design the show. Featuring 30 main characters – with names like Mother, Baker, Asphalt, and Forest – and a chorus called Dust, the entire piece moves from “the deepest of night through all the iterations of the day – dawn, afternoon, and then back to the deepest.” “Night” will take place in a 200-metre-long space, with the audience able to mingle with the performers throughout.

It may seem exhausting, but Martin is, by her own admission, “a total workaholic.” During our long conversation, she frequently moved to browse a file, pull up a video, look at a book, or play a voice memo — talking the whole time.

Sitting in her studio in London, the artist pulls out images of the multi-height set she designed for the opera and plays through rough edits of the five new video works that have been written and shot. In one, we hear a girl say: “Today, I jumped around my room on one foot and then stepped back on the other. Do you believe in ghosts, Lobo?” Even in this incomplete state, the work’s presentation appears to have been scaled down and placed – like a character in A Doll’s House – in a Helen Martin installation.

Martin is also preparing for a solo exhibition at Sadie Coles headquarters, titled Treatise of a Coat. This is the first time Martin has exhibited a large body of her mural work. Like nesting dolls, these drawings consist of colored pencil drawings, mounted within highly sculptural relief frames, mounting themselves on elaborate, multi-layered screen prints, and then framed again. She says the drawings are a “very focused, myopic” depiction of wet things: people eating snails, animals licking cake, and lots of mouths. “It’s not surreal, but there’s a strangeness to it.”

Martin, 39, won the Turner Prize when she was 31, making her the second-youngest recipient of the award after Damien Hirst, who was 30. She was selected for a collection of stunning sculptural works, some of which had been exhibited the previous year at the Venice Biennale. Martin’s victory, not to mention her pioneering political gesture to share with her fellow candidates Turner’s £25,000 winnings and the £30,000 Hepworth Prize she had won weeks earlier, was greeted by critics with both ecstasy and bewilderment. “I have rarely been so stunned,” one wrote. Another said: “The meaning of the work is known to no one but her.”

Martin felt, in her words, “fragmented.” “It’s been a really crazy year,” she says. Ultimately, she felt “very tired and sad of pushing the work out into the world, letting it go and stand on its own—and then being completely misinterpreted as a ‘collection of found objects.'” I work hard on these works. Every movement when I make a sculpture, every part of it, means something clear to me. There’s almost nothing found in my work at all. If it looks like a found object, it’s a found object. Intentional approximation and approximation. The deception went so far as to make it seem real.

These days, she says, she barely thinks about Turner. It certainly didn’t stop her from working. “If anything, it made me fiercer,” she says.

In 2019, Martin decided to write a novel. Being free from the constraints of “gravity, production, shipping, the physical industry, everything, all of that, was so much fun,” she says. Titled Boiling Between Them, it is 321 pages of dense, crisp and utterly confusing prose, and was published in 2020, during lockdown.

“This is my proudest moment,” she says, pointing to the markings on the back of the book. I contacted the writers I admired the most. “The universe appears in Helene Martin’s work, and we know it and we do not know it,” wrote Austrian author and Nobel Prize winner Elfried Jelinek. So did American writer Helen DeWitt, who said that reading Martin’s work produced the same shock that Alexander Calder said he experienced when he visited Mondrian’s studio in 1930: “like slapping a child to make his lungs start working.”

Getting back to work after this writing phase was a challenge. “I felt so cheated in the studio,” Martin says. She had to relearn the “tangible ownership over the material” that always underpinned what she did.

Martin grew up with her twin sister in Macclesfield. While her brother is a natural digital person, for her it has always been about language. “I was definitely a pale, quiet, weird kid,” she says. “I was always collecting little bits and pieces and putting them into funny categories. I had a collection of toothbrushes, and at one point, I hung them up like little bunting around my bedroom. I had collections of all sorts of weird things. I still do.”

She pulls out a folder from one of the top shelves, filled with paper bags from stores all over Europe. She started collecting them in earnest about five years ago, stealing them in various ways from fruit stands or receiving them as donations from like-minded enthusiasts. “The Dutch are great,” she says. “The Netherlands is really good at paper packaging. The French are very good too.”

We spoke for two hours, and all the while, Martin remained completely focused on the interview, her gaze and tone never faltering. In the background, her desktop email is constantly beeping, but she’s not complaining: “I absolutely love everything I’m allowed to do. I feel so lucky to have the access and support to do it, like, He knows What I like.”