ICA is closed from the 30 May – 3 June inclusive.
Helen Cammock, They Call It Idlewild, 2020, 18 min 35 sec.
Book tickets
Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025
This screening presents two deeply personal and politically resonant works by Helen Cammock: They Call It Idlewild (2020) and Changing Room (2014), followed by a conversation with curator Nydia A. Swaby.
In They Call It Idlewild, Cammock reflects on the politics of idleness as a creative and resistant force. Drawing from forgotten histories and artefacts found in Wysing Arts Centre’s archive, the film weaves a poetic meditation on rest, refusal, and the racialised myths surrounding laziness. Referencing Audre Lorde, Mary Oliver and Johnny Mercer, Cammock proposes idleness not as absence, but as a mode of being, feeling, and creating otherwise.
Changing Room is an intimate portrait of Cammock’s father, George Cammock, whose ceramic sculptures become central to a tender and searching reflection on identity, artistry, and inheritance. Through image, poetry and voice, the film navigates intergenerational memory and the lasting imprints of racialised experience across nearly a century. Fragmentary in style, the work resists resolution, offering space for layered and shifting interpretation.
Both films foreground voice – spoken, sung, remembered – as a way of thinking through legacy, resistance, and care. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Helen Cammock and Nydia A. Swaby, exploring the themes of the works and Cammock’s broader artistic practice.
Click here to explore the full exhibition and event programme.
This screening presents two deeply personal and politically resonant works by Helen Cammock: They Call It Idlewild (2020) and Changing Room (2014), followed by a conversation with curator Nydia A. Swaby.
In They Call It Idlewild, Cammock reflects on the politics of idleness as a creative and resistant force. Drawing from forgotten histories and artefacts found in Wysing Arts Centre’s archive, the film weaves a poetic meditation on rest, refusal, and the racialised myths surrounding laziness. Referencing Audre Lorde, Mary Oliver and Johnny Mercer, Cammock proposes idleness not as absence, but as a mode of being, feeling, and creating otherwise.
Changing Room is an intimate portrait of Cammock’s father, George Cammock, whose ceramic sculptures become central to a tender and searching reflection on identity, artistry, and inheritance. Through image, poetry and voice, the film navigates intergenerational memory and the lasting imprints of racialised experience across nearly a century. Fragmentary in style, the work resists resolution, offering space for layered and shifting interpretation.
Both films foreground voice – spoken, sung, remembered – as a way of thinking through legacy, resistance, and care. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Helen Cammock and Nydia A. Swaby, exploring the themes of the works and Cammock’s broader artistic practice.
Click here to explore the full exhibition and event programme.
Bios
Helen Cammock lives and works in North Wales and London. Her interdisciplinary practice spans film, photography, print, text, song and performance, and engages with historical and contemporary narratives around Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. Moving fluidly across time and geography, her works often layer multiple voices and perspectives to explore the cyclical nature of history through poetic, visual and aural assemblage. She was awarded the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2017 and was a joint recipient of the Turner Prize in 2019.
Cammock has exhibited and performed internationally, with recent solo shows including Bass Notes and SiteLines, Amant, Brooklyn (2023); I Will Keep My Soul, Art + Practice, Los Angeles, and UNO Gallery, New Orleans (2023); They Call it Idlewild, Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2023); Concrete Feathers and Porcelain Tacks, The Photographer’s Gallery, London (2021); and Che Si Può Fare, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019). Her recent group exhibitions include Soft Impressions, Dundee Contemporary Arts (2024); Breathing, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2022); and Radio Ballads, Serpentine Galleries, London (2022). Upcoming group shows include Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985–2025 at the ICA, London (2025). Her forthcoming solo show at Kate MacGarry will open in September 2025. She is represented by Kate MacGarry, London.
Nydia A. Swaby is a Black feminist artist-researcher, writer, and curator. Her practice engages archives, autoethnography, photography, the moving image, and the imagination to explore the gendered, diasporic, and affective dimensions of Black being and becoming. Nydia is a member of the editorial board of Feminist Review and co-edited its special issue on Archives. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London, and has previously worked at the ICA and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Nydia was the inaugural Caird Research Fellow jointly based at Royal Museums Greenwich and UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. She is currently a Whose Heritage Curatorial Fellow at Royal Museums Greenwich and serves on the advisory board for the Atlantic Worlds Gallery at the National Maritime Museum. Her first book, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives, was published by Lawrence Wishart in October 2024 as part of its Radical Black Women series. She is the curator of Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar and To Learn to Dance with Fireflies, First Accept the Dark: Five Films by Helen Cammock, both presented as part of Connecting Thin Black Lines, 1985–2025.
Book tickets
07:00 pm
Wed, 13 Aug 2025
Cinema 1
£15 full price / £13 concession
Ticket information
- All tickets that do not require ID (full price, disabled, income support) can be printed at home or stored in email
- For aged-based concession tickets (under 25, student) please bring relevant ID to collect at the front desk before the event.
Access information
Cinema 1
- Both our Cinemas have step free access from The Mall and are accessible by ramp
- We have 1 wheelchair allocated space with a seat for a companion
- All seats are hard back, have a crushed velvet feel and they do not recline
- These are our seat size dimensions: W 42 x D 45 x H 52
- Arm rest either side of the seat dimensions: L 27 x W 7 x H 20
for the following requirements:
- We have unassigned seating. If you require a specific seat, please reserve this in advance
- Free for visitors where ticket prices are a barrier, please email
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