SPOTTED: Metropolis M on Jana Helmhoutova – generational trauma intertwined in textile
- Fine Art
- Design
- Education in Art
Every year, the magazine Metropolis M releases a Graduation Special, featuring work from various alumni who graduated as visual artists. Jana Helmhoutová graduated from Fine Art and Design in Education (part-time) in Zwolle, and is one of the alumni featured in the special. Metropolis M asked Jana: "What is the story behind your work?”
Jana Helmhoutova’s graduation project seems as if it wants to escape from the window of the academy. The jute cobwebs creep like tree roots over the floor and along the wall. In some places, the rope comes together in elongated bulges that recall butterfly pupae. A quote is printed on an empty wall: ‘Threads of past and present create a rhizome where transmission from the previous generation and freedom of choice for the future come together in tension and harmony.’ Helmhoutova sighs. ‘Really, I feel that just showing my work as it is is just as powerful, but when I showed it to a test audience, they connected with it better when I added text.’
Helmhoutova’s work is partly about intergenerational heredity, the idea that trauma or wellbeing are handed down from one generation of a family to another, even if it is rarely spoken about. ‘I grew up in Prague’, she says ‘in what was then communist Czechoslovakia. I already had a strong social conscience as a child. Brainwashed as I was, I dreamt that I would save the British from homelessness as a good communist. Sometimes my mother would euphemistically tell me I should count on the angels for salvation rather than the Party. When, as a teenage girl, I started reading books by Dostoevsky and Sartre, my worldview was shaken to its foundations.’
Helmhoutova’s work has a strong literary/philosophical basis. She talks about Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt, Joke Hermsen and Milan Kundera, from whom she borrowed the quotation on the wall. In the work, Helmhoutova captures what those authors say in words pictorially: our freedom of choice is partly an illusion, because we are preprogrammed by our ancestors. That is both limiting and protective. ‘I was keen that form and content should be one. Textile has the property that it can intertwine and stick together, just like the cluster of choices made over generations. But textile can also be cut, and elsewhere unfold into something new.'
Author: Annabel Essink, writer and art historian