Helen Marshall

Helen Marshall (born 1971) is a British visual artist working with photography and new media. She is best known for her socially engaged and participatory approach to creating public art works which are held in public and private collections. These are often situated in the wider public realm rather than in the context of the gallery or museum. Her work is held in public and private collections, many of which commemorate and celebrate historic events, well-known figures and ordinary individuals. Marshall is an honorary member of the Townswomen’s Guilds. Some of the public art works that she is most noted for include a record-breaking photo mosaic measuring and including 112,896 photographs, The Big Picture, (2008), a portrait of 17-year-old Arthur James Bunce training as an amateur boxer which was unveiled outside Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum at Millennium Point and a diptych photo mosaic depicting the Queen at the time of her coronation in 1953 and her Diamond Jubilee in 2012. This 38 square metre work consisting of 5,000 photos is currently installed at Terminal 2 in Gatwick Airport, south east England. Life and career Marshall was born in Oxfordshire, England in 1971 and moved to East London in 1998 where her art and design studio is based. She began studying at a time when traditional and analogue practices in photography were being superseded by digital technologies and the worldwide web. She studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design, now the Arts University Bournemouth in southern England from 1990 through 1992, he studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design (now Arts University Bournemouth). She studied at the University of Wales Institute (1997) and gained a Masters in Photography in 2010 from the University of Westminster. Marshall has worked on numerous (public) art projects with organisations such as the Clod Ensemble, Westminster Arts, a New Direction, Chisenhale Gallery and Tate Britain. She co-curated and produced Miss Mao with the Gao Brothers, who she met in 2006 when she travelled to Beijing China. The group exhibition was held in her home in East London. In 2006, she created a photo mosaic, The Peoples' Poppy, on the concourse of Victoria Station in London for the Royal British Legion and, a year later she was commissioned to produce an interactive, print and web-based montage for The Photographers’ Gallery composed of thousands of images sourced from photographers around the world.