‘Marie Antoinette’ awarded prestigious Paris arts residency

Her best-known work of art is a performance artwork, My Year as a Fairy Tale, which saw her dressed as Marie Antoinette for a year, 24/7. Helen wore full replica costume and went about her everyday life in Maitland, regional NSW, attracting widespread publicity and community support.

“Flying home in costume was a bit of a challenge.” Helen said. “It’s easy to get stuck in the seats on a Jetstar flight when you’re sporting a huge dress, stays and a ceiling-high wig.”

Helen will spend her time in Paris working on a memoir about her year dressed as the French Queen, referencing local artists and places, as well as her childhood in Tasmania.

“I grew up in Hobart, and went to art school there, before travelling to London to study at the Royal College of Art,” she said.

“Although the book is a memoir – or auto fiction – it’s really the story of many artists: how you balance everyday life and making art; what creative people do to survive.”

Helen says that being in France will give her access to many of the historic sites associated with Marie Antoinette.

“Paris is the perfect place to write this book; I’ll be able to spend time writing and sketching at Versailles, and at the Conciergerie, where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned.

“One of the interesting things about my book is that I’m trying to weave Marie Antoinette’s real life through my own. It’s that old trick of juxtaposing opposites to see what they can teach you about each other.”

Each year Creative Australia offers five residencies, as well as contributing to writers’ travel and living expenses.

“Winning this residency is not only valuable in terms of having the time and space to be able to finish my book, it’s also a wonderful form of practical encouragement.”

The Cité houses a diverse range of artists-in-residence, with over three hundred spending time at the site each year. This convergence of artists from many different artforms, and from various career stages, opens the potential for international collaborations and networks.

Helen will be taking her Marie Antoinette costume to Paris and writing a travel blog on her website during the residency.

“I got the idea (for the performance) from Carmel Bird (BA Dip Ed ’63, DLitt ’22) – one of my favourite Australian writers – that I should try writing my book in costume.”

Helen also recently launched a different book, The Nights, at the Newcastle Writers Festival. Based on the tale of Scheherazade, The Nights is a passionate fairytale that speaks to the creative struggle that all artists endure: the endless search for authenticity, inspiration and time.

Helen still visits Hobart often, looking after elderly family members, doing the occasional writing residency or exhibiting at Despard Gallery.

Here she answers some questions for our Alumni readers.

Congratulations on receiving a Nancy Keesing residency to travel to Paris later this year. What do you hope to achieve while you are there? What are you most excited about?

As a creative teenager, one of the dreams that got me through a fairly rough high school was the idea of travelling to Paris and painting and writing in a garret. I hadn't actually realised that the great wave of Modernism had washed through the city nearly a hundred years before. Yet even today, when you visit Paris, there are cafes where famous writers met and discussed ideas, studios where artists painted, places they wrote about and immortalised in fiction, poetry and art. For an artist, actor, dancer or writer, visiting Paris is akin to a spiritual journey: you get to see where gods walked.

I'm particularly interested in visiting sites associated with Marie Antoinette and having the opportunity to write and sketch in situ. As a visual artist and writer, I am inspired by the nexus between word and image. I'd like to create a series of ekphrastic writings (ie writing in response to an object or visual image) at sites associated with Marie Antoinette or describe objects that she owned. Marie Antoinette is an extremely well-known historical figure, so it’s difficult to interpret her life in a way that doesn't feel banal or cliched. I'm aiming to challenge myself by focussing on the smallest particles of her life: a shoe, an empty cell, a beautifully decorated desk, a garden.

You mentioned you are planning to write a book about your experience in the arts. Do you have any advice about how you balance everyday life and making art, and what creative people do to survive?

I always think advice is like giving a VW driver a Datsun repair manual: what works for one person is chaos for another! My upcoming book, My Year as a Fairy Tale, talks about the line between art and life. The performance I did – where I spent a year, 24/7, dressed as Marie Antoinette – was the first major piece of performance art I'd done. It was a highly speculative creative venture. The experience of literally becoming one's artwork was strange, inspiring and challenging. As someone who had spent a lot of time earning a living and supporting others, the performance was about front-loading the importance of art in my life. It marked a defining point in my life where creativity became a non-negotiable.

Your project My Year as a Fairy Tale, which involved you dressing as Marie Antoinette for a year, sounds fascinating. How did people react?

I became a great comic figure on the streets of Maitland! Some people were terrified, some were intrigued, others were so preoccupied with their own lives that they didn't notice me. At one stage – when an office job had dried up – I was working in the construction industry as a specialist painter. I'd turn up to Sydney building sites wearing jumps (kind of like a dressed-down corset for lounging at home), petticoats, ballet shoes and a fichu. Surprisingly, everyone was either non-committal or just got on with the job.

One of my favourite moments was a tearoom cafe owner complimenting me on my graceful walk. At the time I was doing CrossFit, and we'd done leg training earlier in the day, so the only reason for the dainty walk was that both legs were equally sore!

Would you like to share some of your memories of your Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree at the University’s Centre for the Arts in 1992 and how that time lives on in your career?

Even when I was doing it, I knew that the BFA was a honeymoon experience. The opportunity to immerse oneself in painting and drawing for three years was a wonderful experience. The Centre for the Arts building is an amazing place to work, with a huge atrium to let in natural light, and they've retained many of the original architectural features from when it was the IXL Jam Factory. And I've always been fascinated by ships, so it was nice to walk to university through the docks. The only thing that made the experience difficult was a lack of money. I'd burn through hundreds of dollars of art materials in a short period of time, then have to go off and get work in local restaurants or as a life model to pay for rent and more materials. I remember being so broke that I used to look around the floor of the life drawing room between classes and pick up busted pieces of charcoal to draw with.

As a creative person, the BFA was the first time in my life that education began to make sense. I was able to pursue my own passions, go to the library and immerse myself in reference material, and listen to talks about how other artists worked. In my final year, I had a large studio with an arched window overlooking a large container storage facility and the Derwent River – superb!

Are there other career highlights you would like to share?

My new book, The Nights was launched at Newcastle Writers Festival this year, and includes a foreword by one of my favourite writers, fellow Tasmanian Carmel Bird. I just finished Bird's excellent memoir – Telltale – so it's wonderful to have her introducing my book.

And I've had a play shortlisted for this year's Hollywood Short and Sweet Festival, so that's something that I'm also pleased about.