Holy Smoke

Helen Thompson alias Holy Smoke, is born in Wales, where she lives and works. At the age of seven, her father taught her to sew.
She studied sculpture, completing a BA Hons Fine Art at Newcastle in the North of England and an MA Fine Art at The Royal College of Art, London. Nature as a source of inspiration has prevailed and remained constant throughout her work, her BA degree she exhibited scribbled, stained drawings of hare’s alongside tiny delicate watercolor paintings of a hare’s skeleton.
In the nineties Helen returned to textiles as a main material, creating and manipulating garments, turning the inside out and stitching them closed rendering them unwearable and incapacitated.
This work is presented to The Times London’s Young Artists, the Royal College of Art in London, the Seventeen, in Manhattan, and at 0-9 in Stuttgart.
Late 2000, Helen returned to the theme of nature, producing delicate three dimensional ‘drawings’ of flora and bird’s nests made from wire which were then burnt and left outside to rust and age.
Inspired by a photograph of an Egyptian embalmed dog in the National Geographic magazine in 2011, she established Holy Smoke, a collection of textile animal sculptures.