ARTTYCO TALKS
Helen invites us into shifting urban terrains—where architecture blurs into memory, and industrial structures echo the fragility and complexity of the human body.
ARTTYCO TALKS | September 20 , 2025
EPISODE #13: HELEN SHULKIN
1. Your work often depicts imagined cityscapes in a state of transformation or collapse. What draws you to these speculative urban environments?
H: Because collapse is truth. It peels the skin off civility and reveals the bone underneath. These cities—split, torn, and half-alive—are not imagined. They’re echoes of what the body remembers when it’s been blown apart and asked to keep breathing.
2. There’s a strong sense of control in your compositions, even amid apparent chaos. How much of your process is intuitive versus planned?
H: Control is an illusion that collapses like concrete under fire. I don’t plan—I dissect. The scalpel doesn’t ask permission. It follows the tension where the skin of the building splits like flesh. What looks like control is really exposure.
3. There’s often a cold, metallic stillness in your palette. How do you think color contributes to the emotional atmosphere of your work?
H: Color is a weapon. I use it like shrapnel. Cold steel, ash, dried blood—that’s the spectrum I trust. Sentiment is the language of the unharmed. I paint in the dialect of damage.
4. You’ve described your work as exploring a parallel between architecture and the human body. Could you expand on that comparison? Where do you see that connection most vividly in your work?
H: The body is never separate from its shelter. When a wall collapses, ribs crack. When rebar twists, it's tendons snapping. I don’t paint buildings—I paint the aftermath of being. My canvases are CT scans of collective trauma.
5. What role does memory play in your work? Do your imagined spaces ever emerge from real places you’ve experienced—or are they entirely invented?
H: Memory is never pure. It’s twisted metal and powdered bone. These spaces come from scars—visible and buried. I don’t recreate places; I exhume them. My landscapes are not invented. They are remembered with violence.
