Helen Carnac studied Design Crafts, Blacksmithing, Silversmithing and Jewellery at Plymouth College of Art and Design in 1990 and completed a BA in Silversmithing, Jewellery and Allied Craft at The Cass, London Guildhall University in 1994. She established her studio in the early 1990s and has developed projects using methodologies that are rooted in an awareness of her physical location, place and working practices. She has worked in higher education since 1999 and has taught at Middlesex University on the MA Jewellery Futures and the BA Design Crafts programme, was a Visiting Fellow of the Enamel Research Centre at the University of West of England and most recently worked in the Institute of Making at UCL. She has sat on Artquest’s advisory panel since 2000 and since 2011 has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She moved her studio from London to Somerset in 2020 and describes how this change of location has had a profound impact on her work.

Carnac’s work explores the explicit connections between material, process and maker. She is interested in how one material becomes known through another and enjoys interrogating the attributes of a material in combination with another. In doing so she develops new ways for materials to co-exist and documents how these materials change together over time and in different environments. In her practice she works across materials but has developed a particular expertise in combining vitreous enamel with metal. She is particularly interested in post-industrial landscapes and the translation of metal from its machined state to a material with paper-like qualities. She works with steel or copper with enamel and unusually typically enamels both sides of the metal. She uses sgraffito and printing techniques to draw into the surface of the unfired enamel and after firing, abrades the surface to create a fine paper-like effect. She works metal by rolling, wrapping, folding and corrugating it.

Overlap III is part of a new series of vessels called Ammil, an old English word which means ‘a coat of glittering ice that covers grass, leaf and stone when freeze fast follows thaw’. The vessel was made by folding up, unfolding and re-folding very thin shim copper into a form before sewing it together with wire. She then coated it with multiple layers of both liquid and powdered vitreous enamels and fired it at temperature multiple times. The final layer was fired at a lower temperature so that the enamel fused to the previous layer but retained its powdery form, which is know as a sugar coat. Carnac works with industrial process vitreous enamel, which is a combination of ground glass and porcelain, and it fuses to metal at high temperatures. This work is part of an ongoing series which responds to the changing landscape.