I'm Helen Fleming, a sculptor and installation artist in Wakefield. I make things in resin, silicone, jesmonite, Aquacast and Monster Clay that tend to glow, melt, or otherwise fall apart on purpose, including a resin head sealed with an unplayable bootleg cassette tape, and its ice twin, which I let melt under gallery lights until the lyrics hidden inside were revealed.

I spent a childhood drawing on the back of long sheets of perforated green striped dot matrix printer paper, coding on a home computer my dad built when home computers were a rarity,  taping the top 40 on a Sunday on to a cassette to play on my Walkman for the rest of the week and fascinated by watching Test Card F before BBC programmes would start for the day, typing fake notes from school that school was closed on a typewriter sat under a blanket fort.

I spent my teenage years  with the option in Our Price, Woolworths, Boots and the local independent shop to buy a single on cassette, vinyl or CD all at the same time. I made mixtapes, gifted them, received them and set the VHS recorder to record shows circled in the Radio or TV Times. I learned my friend's phone numbers by heart and called them on a rotary phone. This probably explains why obsolete technology, CRT screens and cassette tape keep turning up in my work. 

Making has been a constant in my life, but not the centre of it. A return to full-time study in Creative Arts at Wakefield College in 2023 changed that, and confirmed where I actually want my working life to go.