Mice & Monsters celebrates Helen’s hidden career
Now aged 91, the Angelina Ballerina illustrator is still experimenting with new artwork
Helen Craig in a still from a film about her life's work, by ARU's Neil Henderson
The remarkable, hidden career of Cambridgeshire artist Helen Craig will be celebrated in a special exhibition at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) this month.
Mice & Monsters: The Life and Work of Helen Craig runs from 15 October to 5 November at ARU’s Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge and will include previously unseen artwork produced by Helen over the last seven decades.
Best known for her illustrations for the popular Angelina Ballerina children’s books, featuring the famous dancing mouse, Helen has enjoyed a separate – but until now overlooked – artistic career spanning photography, ceramics and sculpture.
Now aged 91, Helen is still making sculpture and experimenting with digital photography at her home in Great Shelford, near Cambridge.
The exhibition, which is curated by Pam Smy, an illustrator and former lecturer at ARU’s Cambridge School of Art, will feature portraits Helen took while working as a photographer in London.
These capture household names, including actors and writers such as Margaret Rutherford, Kenneth Williams, Julie Christie, Zoë Wanamaker, Peter O’Toole and John Mortimer, many photographed in their theatre dressing rooms or in their own homes.
Helen’s striking sculptural work features theatrical and imposing mythical beings, often with playful, interactive elements such as removeable headdresses and horse riders, and figures that open to reveal hidden people inside.
The exhibition will also include many of Helen’s much-loved illustrations. As well as her successful and long-running Angelina Ballerina work, Helen has illustrated countless other picture books, story books and nursery rhyme collections, specialising in creating worlds full of tiny details for small children to relish.
“Illustration is only one string to Helen’s bow. She has distinguished herself in several fields of art: including as a portrait photographer, having worked as an assistant to Eve Arnold in North London in the 1950s, and as a sculptor, both in clay, which she began to work in while she lived for three years in Spain in the 1960s, and in other media including bronze and papier-mache. She is compulsively creative, as all serious artists are.”
Nicolette Jones, writer and critic for The Sunday Times
“Helen lives surrounded by her work and influences. Each time I visit Helen, she will open a cupboard or a box and reveal remarkable pieces of art. Helen has been restless in her creativity throughout her life and has continued to be imaginative and inventive, but has always been quite reluctant to promote her work.
“She was a single mother in the 1960s and maintained a creative life whilst bringing up her son, reinventing her work to make a living and support them both. The volume and quality of her work has long been overlooked, and this exhibition is an attempt to redress this and shine a light on her extraordinary career.”
Exhibition curator Pam SmyMice & Monsters runs from 15 October to 5 November and is free and open to the public. The Ruskin Gallery, on ARU’s Cambridge campus, is open Monday to Friday, 9am–5pm. A symposium on Thursday, 16 October will feature a film by ARU’s Neil Henderson about Helen’s life and work, and an essay by Nicolette Jones of The Sunday Times.