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Artist Helen Cammock (pictured) has a message for solicitors. When her new artworks, commissioned to mark the Law Society’s bicentenary, are unveiled next week, she hopes that the message will come across loud and clear. ‘It’s quite direct in the work,’ she said. ‘It’s trying to say, “I can see how hard it is, I can see how hard the road is going to be, but it’s really important, so please go forward and… carry on with it”.’
The 55-year-old Turner Prize recipient was invited to Chancery Lane along with other shortlisted artists before working on her proposal. She then presented her vision to an interview panel of 13 people – a process she describes as ‘terrifying’ – before her project was chosen in June. Rather than a single monument, she has created three distinct works for the imposing entrance hall – a poem, a banner and a series of line drawings. Each represents aspects of the law and the legal profession.
The first piece, Ode to the Just, is a short, rhymed stanza rendered in stainless steel letters on teal backgrounds, tying in the colour of the sash worn by newly admitted solicitors. The letters are fixed into the archways of the entrance hall, so solicitors and visitors read the verse as they go in: ‘To hold the line/yet progress the line/takes care and weathered feet/To carry a line in anothers story/Is what just minds shall seek.’
Cammock told the Gazette: ‘It’s an acknowledgement of how hard it is to hold the line, and how complicated that can be as laws shift and change, as society moves, as ethics and political contexts shift and change. The weathered feet is about marching forward, staying with it, and about ethics, commitment and resilience. It’s a call to action as well.’
The banner will hang from the top of the staircase near the library and is entitled A Balanced Scale. For Cammock, it has connotations of labour, collective membership, protest and associations, and she has woven in colours used in courtroom attire. The work incorporates shapes intended to represent the different people who contribute to the profession, as a nod to a shift in the diversity of the profession, and includes the words ‘No one above the law, No one beneath protection’ – an echo of a 1903 speech by US president Theodore Roosevelt.
‘Hold tightly to your principles, your ethics, your care and your perseverance – because the law is nothing without its guardians’
Helen Cammock
She describes it as encapsulating the commitment to the rule of law, but it is also ‘a reminder of what happens in societies when that isn’t adhered to, and what happens when people don’t follow the rule of law. Fairness and equity kind of fall by the wayside’.
The final work, A People’s Practice, will be installed in the foyer under the stairs. It is a series of abstract line drawings, etched into birchwood panels. ‘I suppose, for me, these are about the flow, the movement, the flux in the profession,’ she said. ‘They’re… about the stress, the movement, the speed – sometimes relentless – the cycles that I’m sure solicitors witness, the exhaustion, and maybe some of the joy and sadness that they witness in their practice.’
Cammock’s work was influenced by experiences of the law and legal profession; through her father, who sat as a lay magistrate, and her former career as a social worker. ‘My dad chose to be a magistrate because he felt really strongly in the 1970s that, particularly for young black men, there wasn’t parity before the law. He was a teacher who was really worried about many of the young people he worked with in west London at the time. He felt like he needed to have a place there in order for fairness as well.’
She also wanted to reflect on the role of lawyers to care for and support clients in difficult times. ‘There was something that I wanted to bring out about care and empathy and its significance,’ she added.
The works are intended to give a nod to the past, but with a laser focus on the present and a look ahead to the future because, says Cannock, ‘we’re living in the now and this is where it matters’. While her message for solicitors through her art will soon be revealed, her message in words is: ‘Hold tightly to your principles, your ethics, your care and your perseverance, because the law is nothing without its guardians. You are the guardians of A People’s Practice.’
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