bio
Zebedee Helm
Zebedee Helm was born in 1970. He has considered himself an artist since he was 5 when Mrs Kevill his primary school teacher said he was the 2nd best drawer in the class. His father, a bird book publisher forced him to paint birthday cards for his father’s relations until he turned 21 and became a man.
He foundationed at Camberwell in 1988 and then went on to study fine art at Leeds University. Helm found himself the 1st person in 40 years to be sent down from the art course, the reason for his premature exit was given as inappropriate behaviour…
Helm’s history…
Moving to Gloucestershire Helm soon found himself absorbed into a pastoral existence with simple country types. He learned the craft of signwriting and later apprenticed himself to a drunken stone mason.To cut costs he bought a 2nd hand red indian tipi tent in which he lived in the summers on various estates in the county. He created his own sculpture park,in a particularly picturesque bit of landscape, by carving huge stone boulders into various animals.These were serious undertakings, each piece taking several weeks to finish, Helm living next to them in his tent, where he found himself the object of visitations from the local primary school and the gamekeepers daughter who would swing by with freshly roasted pheasants in a basket under her arm. To this day these sculptures remain, baffling pick-nickers and joy riders alike. Helm went on to develop this playful streak by creating a set of novelty roadsigns, which were extremely realistic in appearance yet bizarre in terms of content. There were 17 different designs, for instance one had a question mark on it, another a pair of lips. The council confiscated the lot within 3 days, and though they never were able to link Helm with the prank they burnt them, posts and all, at the annual guy fawkes carnival.
Through his interest in signwriting Helm discovered, around this time, the secret of painting and gilding on the reverse of glass. The simple abstact cartoons he’d been working on in his huge studio, a former hot-rod factory on the top of a hill, were suddenly transformed, when painted not on rough plywood sheets which attracted the dust and floating rural chaff onto the drying paint, but on sheets of big shiny glass, the reverse of the paint, still captured dust, but the front of it was preserved in a pristine state revealed in all its glory only when the glass was turned over.
His first breakthrough exhibition came in 1997 when he exhibited his reverse glass creations of abstract cartoonism in Islington. Basement Jaxx, provided the musical background, their breakthrough was to come some time later.The climax of the evening came when 2 people were discovered mating, naked in a pool of their own vomit in a corner of the downstairs part of the gallery. They’d mistaken the gallery for the sexual fetishists’ club which was right next door. The exhibition proved a wild success and Helm sold all his pictures.