Mud Physics

Critical writings that index the material and linguistic problems of making art.

Compiled here for the first time, the selected writings of Helen Marten probe the critical spaces between image and language, material subject and conceptual idea. Working across sculpture, painting, drawing, writing, and video, Marten has emerged as one of the leading voices of her generation, investigating how we exist within and retranslate the world around us. Driven by both informational logics and emotional heat, her object-making compels a peculiar engagement with language—its wounding or wailing power, its sly metamorphosis, its seduction. She explores this submerged side of materiality where dark intent lies, questioning the linguistic framework of theoretical doubt as the place where mistakes are embraced to become generative. 

Marten envisages the artist to be like a busy dog, sticking its nose into the indexes of social or technological space and shuffling things about, coaxing or relegating artefacts to the peripheries like an aggravating archaeologist. This iterative flexibility holds great appeal, but also a certain danger—to find exposed and sticky the granular indecency of material, its mechanistic hierarchies, its feral stink of policy or corruption. Exploring theories of the mercantile and the digital, her writing examines craft as syntax and touch as a rejection of heteronormativity: instead, pleasure in material promiscuity is felt as a “fundamental itch.” With additional texts on fellow artists including Cady Noland, Sigmar Polke, Hervé Télémaque, Laura Owens, Matthew Barney, Charline von Heyl, and Lubaina Himid, Marten explores accumulative textual venture as an inventive mode of saturation.

Approximation, models, collage and inlay; dust, vectors, animals, snow, blood and diagrams—the essays compiled in Mud Physics consider the human figure as one that hauls itself through an immense field of daily signs, sorts agitated language into piles, and emerges via the triumphant urgency of the imagination.