'It was a magical place to grow up': Artist uses childhood home as canvas

I'm still getting used to it. It's quite disconcerting,' says Carla von der Becke, gazing at an array of farming tools - big saws included - hanging around a rustic chandelier in the kitchen of her home in the South Downs. The seemingly perilous arrangement is the latest intervention here, in the house where Carla grew up, by her friend the South African artist HelenA Pritchard (who stepped in on her own behalf to add the 'A' at the end) .

The two women met ten years ago through mutual friends in the art world - Carla is co-director of the PR agency based at London Albany Arts - and HelenA had occasionally been a visitor to the house when Carla stayed with her parents. Then, in early 2021, Carla's mother died "quite unexpectedly. She was taking care of my dad, who had dementia, so I was here to take care of him, and it was pretty intense…” That's when HelenA offered to come and stay longer. a long time. "Carla had no help, she did everything herself and I thought maybe she just needed a friend. And I love going out in the countryside."

The house, which Carla's parents bought in 1974 and whose oldest was built in 1690, proved fertile ground for HelenA penchant for working with abandoned or neglected materials, to “reconfigure things”, as she puts it. Tiles left over from the construction of a swimming pool years ago found their way into some of his sculptures, for example, as did the contents of decades-old Farrow & Ball paint cans. In her makeshift studio in one of the many old-looking outbuildings, where a copy of Waiting for Godot sits among other seemingly timeless accretions on the floor, she opens a box of pink scale. “Some of the paint is almost hard, so I can use it in a sculptural way,” she says. "I like to walk around the house then and think 'Eureka! - I found where they actually used that color!" "She likes it to be 'the continuation of something, so it's not necessarily what the finished work is, it's the materials and their history that are important.