For one successful artist finding the beauty in little things led her to household surrealism. Her next project will see her present her take on the Cyprus cat
Kids do it constantly, at least till they become jaded teenagers. ‘Look!’ they’ll exclaim, ‘A dog!’, pointing at a rocky protuberance (that does look a bit like a dog’s snout) or a thicket of twigs at unusual angles. ‘Look! A chair! A squirrel!’ – while you’re trying to explain that that cloud isn’t really a pony, and there’s no actual man in the Moon.
A Russian-born, London-based artist with 364,000 Instagram followers does it too, and does very well out of it. “No magic! I simply stare at things longer than socially acceptable,” writes Helga Stentzel on her Insta (@helga.stentzel), speaking of her brand of ‘household surrealism’ – but it’s still a bit uncanny, one of those things you can’t quite believe until you see it.
She deals in artworks, but they’re also optical illusions. Her material of choice is now laundry (!), but it used to be food. She’s created a puppy out of lettuce – actually two heads of lettuce, one for the head and another for the torso, plus gem lettuce for legs and three olives for the eyes and nose. (There’s another puppy made from sliced bread.) The trompe l’oeil can be fiendishly simple: the mere addition of stems makes a dozen eggs suddenly resemble round, plump tomatoes.
Her current process, using clothes, is also deceptively simple. ‘Smooothie’, for instance, features two bits of laundry on a clothesline, one brown and heavy (it might be a coat, its sleeves twisted to approximate legs), the other a T-shirt in pink and grey layers.
On paper, it sounds incoherent. In a photo, with clothes-pegs for horns and a “sun-kissed valley” for background, it looks exactly – exactly! – like a cow. You don’t even have to squint, as you do at a cloud when your kid claims to see some exotic resemblance; it looks like a cow. One might also mention that ‘Smooothie’ is on sale at Helga’s website (https://www.helgastentzel.com/) but only the large size is left, priced at a cool €2.287,95.
Thousands of followers, thousands of euros per photo… Helga Stentzel is a wildly successful artist – which goes against the odds, for two reasons.
The first is that she comes from Omsk, a city in Siberia so remote it comes with its own wry fatalism. “‘Don’t even try to leave Omsk’,” she recalls, laughing. Helga’s around 40, with the elfin look of a young Geena Davis. “This is like a meme… ‘If you’re born here, you stay here’. Because it’s so depressing!”
The second reason is the kind of art she does, which some might dismiss as ‘cute’ – she stiffens at the sound of that word – without appreciating the philosophy behind it. Cows made of laundry? With the world in the state it’s in? “I think now I truly believe that what I do is important,” she says – suggesting that it wasn’t always so clear-cut, even in her own mind.
In fact, the laundry animals were therapeutic from the start, having been launched during lockdown. “I have two children,” she explains – two boys, 14 and 10 – “so at one point I felt that all I was doing during lockdown was laundry. Laundry, laundry and more laundry!”
She’d always had a knack – ever since childhood – for noticing familiar shapes in inanimate objects; one day, stuck in the house during laundry, she glanced at a sock on the floor and saw a horse’s head staring back at her. She photoshopped a sweeping rural vista behind the shape, letting the horse “roam free… And it went viral. I think people were also missing the freedom that was captured in the image”. Not to mention being able to relate to the laundry theme.
Four years on, Helga’s work is being exhibited all over the world – which is also how she happened to meet a Cypriot art collector in New York, who sang the praises of his native country. Soon after – by coincidence, or was it? – a friend gave her a novel set partly in Cyprus (The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak) as a Christmas present, all of which explains why she’s sitting in Nicosia’s old town in sleepy mid-August, doing research for a new, laundry-based project on Cyprus cats.
Empty streets swelter in a blanket of heat. Actual, non-laundry cats mill around on the fringes – cats like Mitzi, a “street fighter” stray who’s missing an eye. “Souzana also has a cat,” notes Helga. “His name is Ziggy, he’s a very cute red cat with green eyes.” ‘Souzana’ is Souzana Petri, a local artist (“an amazing ceramicist”) who’s hosting her during this brief trip – which is just to take some photos and get a sense of the place. The real work comes later, at her home base in Hammersmith, when she’ll shape her materials, adding a few Cyprus touches.
She’s noticed, for instance, that our sterilised cats “have a little triangle taken out of their ear”, and plans to incorporate that. “I want to take out the ‘ear’ of the knickers with a peg,” says Helga – then opens her bag and takes out the knickers in question, to illustrate.
No surprise that she’s already found the clothes she plans to use, or that she fixates on little details. She’s a perfectionist – she has to be. This kind of art needs to be exactly right, or it just looks lame. She’ll stand around tweaking laundry for literally hours, making tiny adjustments – “and then at some point I just tell myself, ‘Helga, stop. Stop!!! That’ll do’”.
That disciplined streak got her out of Omsk – it helped that her grandma was ethnic-German, allowing the whole family to relocate to Germany in 2003 – and to the ultra-prestigious Central Saint Martins in London, where she studied Graphic Design and Advertising. A decade as a freelancer followed, crafting “Instagram content” out of household items for clients including BBC children’s shows – and the child’s eye has always been there, side-by-side with the perfectionist.
“I think we all have inner children, somewhere deep inside,” she muses. “And I think in order to feel truly happy, we need to feel connected to that little girl or boy deep inside us – because this is the source of joy. If there is no connection, there is no joy. This is what I believe.”
But does joy necessarily need that childish component, though?
“I think joy is always a bit childish… People jump from joy, it’s a very childish reaction! I think the beauty of joy – when it’s pure joy – is that we can’t control it.
“With anger and sadness, as adults we’ve learned to suppress them,” points out Helga, “whereas joy is still okay to have. It’s still okay to be joyful… And I think this is what needs to be – just, celebrated. And this is what I’m trying to do with my work: celebrate joy.”
That’s why calling it ‘cute’ is inadequate, and misses the mark. There’s a lot of darkness in the world, and Helga – who has both Russian and Ukrainian roots, and recently made a laundry-dove called ‘Peace’ with proceeds going to a Ukrainian charity – is aware of that. But that’s why what she does is important: because looking at the world anew, and with humour, can help quell the sadness.
“You can train yourself to see the beauty of the little things,” is how she puts it.
“And it’s not about some fake positivity. It’s about acknowledging that very often, when we chase the big things or big happiness – you know, this idea of ‘happiness’, what do we need to be happy, how many things do we need, what job must we have to be happy…”
She shakes her head: “To me, it’s all about the little things. Happiness is in doing laundry mindfully… It’s in walking around and seeing little faces. Just in noticing – yeah, all the little things”.
She herself still notices, staring at things ‘longer than socially acceptable’. That’s how most of her artworks kick off, even now – organically, as when she was cutting up lettuce for salad and noticed that it looked like a puppy. “I said to my husband: ‘Look, it’s a dog!’,” she recalls – but he couldn’t see it (he works in medical research, and isn’t really much for flights of fancy), so she determined to make him see it.
Could AI also do what she does? Probably – but it doesn’t have the humour, and it wouldn’t be the same anyway. What stirs people’s souls is the vision, the sense of a human being sharing her way of looking at the world. A cow on a clothesline is funny; the fact that someone saw that cow – that, indeed, it was always there to see – is inspiring.
A cow on a clothesline – or an elephant, a zebra, a camel. A windmill in Mykonos tweaked into a goofy-looking seagull. Houses magicked into faces, a piece of cake turned into a terrier. Two balls of wool posed to resemble a loving couple, ‘her’ head resting on ‘his’ shoulder. Not so much an escape from the world – that’s not the point – as a re-imagining, the secret thrill of finding magic in the everyday, the joy of playing pretend and asking ‘what if’. The joy of little things.
