Helen Marriage
Helen Marriage is Artistic Director of Artichoke, one of the UK’s leading independent arts companies, uniquely transforming landscapes and public expectations through recognising the ambitions of artists and inserting their work into the routines of everyday life.
Artichoke’s projects lie at the conjunction of art, politics and communication, achieving high impact through a startling disruption of daily life. It is the company’s belief that, while this artistic transformation of a familiar landscape may be ephemeral, the transformation of individual audience members leaves a permanent legacy. Artichoke has produced some of the UK’s most talked about large-scale art events ranging from Royal de Luxe’s The Sultan’s Elephant, which saw central London come to a standstill with over 1,000,000 spectators; through Antony Gormley’s One & Other with its 2400 participants, to Peace Camp made by Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw for the London 2012 Olympic Festival. In 2015, Artichoke collaborated with Burning Man artist David Best, to produce Temple in the conflict-ridden arena of Derry~Londonderry, in the north of Ireland.
Artichoke’s biennial festival celebrating the power of light, Lumiere Durham, has become an international sensation, drawing visitors from across the globe to the wintry darkness of Northern England. Editions of the festival have now been seen in both Northern Ireland and, more recently, in London in January 2016. In September 2016, Artichoke was commissioned by the City of London to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London. Media coverage of the event spanned the world.
Helen was made a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2012 and given an MBE in the UK’s New Year’s Honours List in 2016.