Helen Savage
Crossing Boundaries, 2026

Recycled sugar paper, newsprint paper, digital prints, aluminium frames, wooden table

Drawing on her own experiences as a prison tutor between 2024 and 2025 at HMP Belmarsh, London, Crossing Boundaries presents extracts from a fictional text. Installed in the Library at OSE, the library here stands in for ‘the gate’ conjured in the text. The gate is the name used for a secure entryway designed to prevent unauthorised passage or escape. This system typically uses two interlocking doors or gates. Only one gate can be opened at a time, creating an airlock that allows guards to safely vet people before they enter or exit.

The narrator’s deadpan description leads the viewer through the library, where boundaries between self and other, privacy and intimacy, and outside and inside begin to slip. Images and library furniture pick up the text around the room, extending it into the space.

The work is shaped by her position as a privileged outsider as a former prison tutor who could step through the gate each day and return home, unlike the learners whose lives were contained by the institution. The minimal approach to the display of the work reflects this distance, offering a plain account that acknowledges its partial view, shaped by privilege, access, safety, and freedom.

Helen Savage is an artist and writer based in London and Margate. Through a cross disciplinary approach, her practice explores text as visual art. Helen’s writing has been published by somethingother.blog and by Cipher Press in their anthology ‘Nights Like This’. In 2021 she was awarded a master’s in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths University and she holds a degree in Mixed Media Fine Art from the University of Westminster.