How artist Helen Cammock is finally coming into her own

Helen Cammock’s old job is coming in handy. No, not her job as a social worker (though more of that later).

The artist, winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and Turner Prize nominee, has been drawing on her skills as a former club singer for her new exhibition, Che si può fare. ‘As a family we moved from west London to Somerset when I was 12, and there wasn’t much to do there as a teenager,’ she tells me. ‘So I taught myself to play guitar and sing, and that’s what I did as a job. My mum had to come with me when I played in clubs, as I was too young to go by myself, so she would sit at the back.’

It’s fair to say things have changed a bit for Cammock since then. We meet on a bright, sunny day at her east London studio, which is a hive of activity when I arrive: photographs strewn across the floor and tables, pictures pinned to the walls, mugs of tea balanced on desks. It’s been a hectic day and Cammock is only now sitting down to lunch (it’s 2pm) after a morning shooting pictures for this feature, before a string of afternoon meetings. Now 48, she won last year’s Max Mara Prize, which includes a six-month residency in Italy and exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Earlier this year, she was nominated for the Turner Prize, due to be exhibited in Margate in September.

‘I think winning the Max Mara Prize was, as much as anything, about having belief in myself,’ she says, ripping open a bag of crisps and offering me one. She’s refreshingly friendly but reserved, a little uneasy with her success. ‘I feel differently about how I work now and… I don’t know how to explain this, but I guess I just believe I’m an artist now. In London especially, when you say you’re an artist, people go: “Oh yeah, right, but what else do you do?” But I feel I can say it now, it’s true.’

Che si può fare, which opens at the Whitechapel next week, focuses on musical laments, multiple histories and marginalised voices, represented through singing, print-making and film. ‘She makes boundaries between disciplines disappear,’ says Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel, ‘and gives a voice to those who have been silenced.’ Cammock spent her six months in Italy travelling around the country, from Bologna to Florence, Venice, Rome, Palermo and Reggio Emilia, meeting historians, musicians and singers, and the locals who would go on to appear in her work. ‘I just really thrive on people, it’s what keeps me feeling alive,’ she says. ‘It was a really intense six months of meeting people and exchanging stories and experiences.’

There’s no doubt that Cammock is a people person. Born in the Midlands to an English mother and Jamaican father, she grew up around the UK, from London to Somerset and Brighton, and now lives between Brighton and east London, the latter of which she likes for its sheer diversity: ‘I sit on the bus or the Tube and feel like I’m surrounded by very different people, and that’s a very comforting thing.’

Cammock was a social worker for 10 years before she became an artist, but struggled with the lack of funding. ‘I started to question it — what am I doing if I can’t support people and sustain change? I would say all of the people I worked with over those 10 years never felt like they had a voice,’ she says. ‘The reality is they weren’t heard, they weren’t listened to, and I want to change that.’ After taking an evening course in photography, she decided to pursue art full time. ‘I always knew I wanted to work with people, and I just thought, okay, I need to do something differently.’

The forthcoming exhibitions at the Whitechapel and then Collezione Maramotti in October have taken a lot of preparation, from singing practice (‘I had classical singing lessons in Italy, which were really hard’) to mugging up on Italian (‘Oh my goodness, I’m trying my best’). But Cammock still finds time for hiking in Snowdonia — ‘I love the ruggedness of it’ — and visiting other London galleries such as Thomas Dane and Tate Modern. She also teaches at the Royal College of Art, where she did her MA, and feels passionately about promoting the importance of art: ‘There’s so much research now that shows businesses are looking for people who can be creative in any line of work — it equips people really well to be members of society.’

It would be an understatement to say that Cammock has plenty on her plate, especially now that she has been nominated for the Turner Prize, which she describes, in her low-key way, as a ‘surprise and a great privilege’. We finish our interview bang on time so that she can stay on schedule for those afternoon meetings. As I get up to leave, she points to some Italian text, scrawled on the wall as part of her research. I ask her to read it out to me — given how self-deprecating she’s been throughout our interview, I sense her Italian is far better than she’s letting on — but she laughs and shakes her head.

‘I’m definitely not saying it in Italian! But this is a text that’s going on a six-metre-long, screen-printed frieze.’ Referring to the many, multi-layered and personal stories of the exhibition, part of it reads ‘a normal, extraordinary life’. Which, as I leave her to a busy day and an even busier few months ahead, feels like a pretty good representation of Cammock herself.

Che si può fare opens at the Whitechapel Gallery on 25 June, before travelling to Collezione Maramotti in Italy from 13 October (whitechapelgallery.org)