Intoxicated Thinking — In conversation with artist Helenskià Collett

Album covers are a big deal. They’re a doorway to a record’s sound world, and an expandable universe in their own right. We knew straight away who to work with on the imagery for our debut EP ‘Recreation’. Helenskià Collett has been a part of the Manchester Collective family for as long as we’ve been collaborating with The White Hotel, Salford’s notorious ex-MOT garage-turned-nightclub whose distinctive visuals she’s responsible for. We spoke to the artist about how she approached the making of the ‘Recreation’ cover, as well as her wider practice and influences.

Pour yourself a glass of wine. It intends to be drank. You intend to drink it. There is a pause before this. It (you) linger(s). You (it) anticipate(s). There is rumination during this. It (you) suspend(s). You (it) alter(s). There is annihilation after this. It (you) disappear(s). You (it) are (is) drunk.

Tell us a little bit about your artistic practice.

Intoxicated thinking is friends with existentialism and a semi-permanent hangover, so my artistic practice is built on a cycle of frenzy and rest; currently ‘Hyperdecanting’. I use wine as a way to critique excessive knowledge. My work is an expression of an evolving and parasitic boozy philosophy… How do you see the world with grey drunk eyes?

‘Hyperdecanting {Method 1}’ (2020 / work-in-progress)

I zig-zag across different media, often working with writing and image (website & pamphlet), sculptural props (asemic plasticine), and performance (only when tipsy). One yearning contemplation (& glass of wine) overrides another. These are always recorded and presented in iterative ways – lo-fi printing, scanning, tape recording, screen shooting, defunct webcamming.

My finished projects are heavily layered, philosophical scenographies, highlighting details of knowing (& unknowing), unified by a glitchy, red wine-stained aesthetic. I am the drunk creeper of my own nuanced work.

What are some of your influences?

Staring into a minute pour of heavy wine in an ornate glass for hours, then necking it like a shot of espresso. Empty bottles of wine infiltrate my studio and philosophy-filled books penetrate my practice. I forever find myself looking up and down and left and right at sprouting piles of constantly reshuffled books. These towers of compacted words and images ground me, and drown me.

'Re-reading by the Bottle' (2020 / work-in-progress)

Today, the writing of Michel Serres weaves its way through my ‘Mingled Body’. His writing (in French) has been described as untranslatable and reading it is like an ‘eternal wobble’. I am sat on his see-saw of information hunger and its prolific deciphering.

I’m a culture junkie. Everything is a bookmark or a tab or a potential alleyway ~ a scuffed Pompeii monograph, Plath’s letters, Godard’s fuzzy moving image, Beauvoir on YouTube, ‘The Devils’ soundtrack, Derrida’s cat, pilgrimages to plague towns, sherry and oysters.

How did you approach the making of the ‘Recreation’ cover?

It had to start with the music (& wine). I listened to the EP (& drank) over and over. Words fell out of my ears ~ swarming ~ shadows of sound {in the room}… an echo, like a splash ~ shiny, oily fine lines of higher drama beyond the day-to-day.

A photograph from my archive stretched out under the scanner ~ The Choragic Monument of Thrasyllos’s {Athens} paired black monoliths… dilated pupils re-written & re-written & re-written ~ the arts of woozy Dionysus lived there.

We are all spiked all the time, aren’t we? When I listened to ‘Recreation’, I felt the rush and worked under pixelated candlelight.

How would you describe the mood on this record?

As my experience of Manchester Collective has always been a live one, in the vibrating dust and close bodies of The White Hotel, the record is bubblingly introverted ~ playing to our murky inner-selves, warped fantasies of time, dense silk sinking in deep, black water.

It gives me hissbumps. Tunnel vision.

What artwork or artist has caught your attention recently?

An absolute oldie but a goodie, there is an Aby Warburg show at the HKW in Berlin at the moment – all of the panels of his ‘Bilderatlas Mnemosyne’ reconstructed for the first time since 1929… Am I hallucinating?

On a Berlin hallucination note, I am also forever trying to get people to watch Ulrike Ottinger’s ‘Ticket of No Return’ (it is notoriously difficult to find), a woman’s drinking spree on a one-way journey there. Just look up the film stills to be mesmerized by the narcissistic beauty of binge drinking.

My soundtrack as I type is Lisa Lerkenfeldt’s ‘Collagen’.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m looking at a very apt book/documentary called ‘Garage’ by Olivia Erlanger & Luis Ortega Govela – an artistic take on the history of these suburban box dreams/nightmares.

Along with my romantic visions of past winemakers’ ‘Vins de Garage’ (hyperbole wines), I am slowly turning my own garage into a semi-private, social home for sobriety-wine & art & books et al; an independent somewhere, a place for under-the-counter culture in a city coming unfixed. My temporary living room studio can’t wait to move in and (no thanks to Lockdown) is weeping under the weight of my current work’s progress ~ sculptural clay wine-straws sprayed shiny black, their 3D forms uber-translated from soused shorthand.

Forever wine-wise, I am putting the pieces together to work towards a monograph of its incessant manifestation in art (what artist/gallery doesn’t have wine glasses in the cupboard?). Come and see my drinks’ cabinet soon?

Finally, what’s your favourite place to hang out in Manchester?

I’ve lost many hours to the velvety backroom womb at The Talleyrand in Levenshulme. They serve Hells in chodes and Coffee Patron in sticky surplus. My friend describes entering as ‘signing a deal with the devil’ and trying to leave before midnight is a waking labyrinthine dream. It’s my favourite culture pub in Manchester.

Helenskià Collett is an {Intoxicated} Thinker/Drinker conceiving ‘Wine Praxis’ as a performative act of inquiry into our understanding of artistic reasoning and motive. Currently working with collage essays, clay shorthand & iterative scanography (& drinking culture), her works are presented as evolving multimedia projects; each a new wormhole through an old bottle of wine.

+ Occasional ‘Woman’ at The White Hotel (Salford) / + Casual Somme at Vin-Yard (Manchester) / + Nearly a Master of Fine Art (University of Leeds) / Enter the Mind Pub / Too sober Instagram