REMEMBERING HELEN: MY MOTHER THE ARTIST

By: Adam Yamey, Mala Yamey

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The author's mother, Helen Yamey (1920-1980) was born in South Africa. In 1948, she came to the UK, and by 1952, she had become a sculptor. In the 1950s and ‘60s, she worked in the Sculpture Department of London’s St Martins School of Art alongside now famous sculptors including Elisabeth Frink, Anthony Caro, David Annesley, Eduardo Paolozzi, Menashe Kadishman, William Tucker, and Phillip King. Helen’s work was of a sufficiently high quality for it to be selected for showing in exhibitions that included the above-mentioned artists as well as others including David Hockney, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Duncan Grant, and Jean Arp. Yet, unlike the artists listed, she and her work have become largely forgotten. In this biography of Helen, “Remembering Helen: My Mother the Artist”, Adam Yamey describes her career as an artist, what she was like as a person, and explores why she did not make a reputation like those with whom she worked and exhibited. The book contains illustrations of many of Helen’s sculptures, and the author's daughter, Mala Yamey, an art historian and curator, has written notes about my mother’s sculptural works.

An interesting life

I almost passed this by, because virtual voice recordings usually irritate me.
In this book- a biography- there isn't much to complain about, since there's no need for a dramatic rendition or different voices.
It sounds very natural, though it's odd that they used a female voice for a book written by a man telling his mother's story, with lots of refernces to himself.
However, VV has problems with heteronyms (Yes, I had to look it up to get the correct term to describe words which are spelled the same, but pronounced differently, depending on their meaning). There are several cases throughout the book, but the funny one which crops up more than once is Polish people being called "polish" as if they were shoes to be shined.
Anyway, Helen Yamey was a remarkable person and there are a lot of interesting insights and anecdotes.
One small complaint- the book obviously contains a number of photos, so it would be nice if a pdf was included with these images.