Rory Pilgrim and Helen Cammock Use Art to Address Care in a Strained Welfare State

Rory Pilgrim and Helen Cammock are among UK artists whose practices center on care work, responding to a welfare system in crisis. Pilgrim's Turner Prize-nominated oratorio RAFTS (2022), first shown at Serpentine Galleries' Radio Ballads exhibition, uses music and poetry to explore support networks and vulnerability. Cammock's film Bass Notes and SiteLines (2022) documents group sessions with women from the charity Pause, using song and silence to address care and numbness. Both artists draw on personal experience: Pilgrim has been a caregiver and their parents are carers; Cammock worked as a social-care worker for ten years. They see art as offering a fluidity impossible in social work, making care visible amid austerity policies that have shrunk the welfare state since the 1980s. Pilgrim's RAFTS is on view at Towner Eastbourne until 14 April 2024; the Turner Prize winner will be announced on 5 December 2023. Cammock's I Will Keep My Soul runs at the Rivers Institute, New Orleans, from 14 October to 17 December 2023.