Helen Lindsay is a freelance collections care specialist, paper conservator, land conservationist and artist. As a conservator, she provides support for organisations wanting to improve access to their collections. Helen Lindsay has worked for an extensive range of organisations including St Paul’s Cathedral, National Archives of Scotland, UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, British Film Institute, Tate Britain, Institute of Conservation ICON, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Wellcome Trust.

Helen Lindsay, left to right, nettle paper, collage and bog oak paper

Helen publishes and researches widely. Notably she is the original author of Benchmarks in Collections Care and the best practice guide for the Archives and Records Association, Volunteering in Collections Care.

Helen Lindsay is also an artist, with a varied practice of her own. This includes taking up the legacy of her charismatic late father, the prolific writer, artist and political activist, Jack Lindsay. Jack spent a lifetime arguing for social justice, searching for an ideal society governed by art, not commerce. As a means of continuing from his activism, she has been producing agit-prop street theatre together with Norwich-based performing arts community organisation The Common Lot. Together they organised a series of well-attended public Declamations through the streets in 2024.

Land conservation

However, here, Helen Lindsay describes her daily life as a custodian of a beautiful piece of land. She lives just outside the Norfolk village of Reepham and has generously made her land and home available for the GroundWork Residency and is one of our hosts. Elsewhere on this site there is a blog about the last year there for the artists in residence.

“Human history and our landscape are inescapably entwined. What we do now to our land will either devastate or cultivate these links. “

Helen Lindsay walks her dog most mornings on the same route, up the same track….

“where the banks start low and quietly rise to the height of my shoulders. On the left there is an open field, messy with weeds, in between crops. On the right there is a mass of brambles, nettles, smothered hawthorn. Wild honeysuckle appears at the top of the slope, its fronds heading skywards. Behind this lattice of scrub, the trees start. They weren’t there when we came and now they cover more than half the field.”
 

Letting nature take its course

“I hadn’t intended to buy a house with 18 acres of land but when we moved from London to Norfolk in 2010, I was captivated by Broomhill. It’s too small to be a farm and too big to be a garden but it encompasses a range of habitats and terrain that are endlessly fascinating.

My model of land management consists of doing as little as possible and letting nature take its course. But even that involves a lot of work – cutting back scrub, fending off the nettles, willow and hawthorn from taking over, and mending fence posts which seem to rot and fall over every few months.”

Noticing imperceptible differences

Having a piece of land to walk every day allows Helen Lindsay to observe apparently imperceptible differences.

“Looking down during a walk along a woodland path, I spied a line of tiny holes in the sandy track. They weren’t there the day before. I don’t know who made them. Solitary digger wasps, maybe? Whoever it is, they like the open edge of the path. A week later all sign of the holes is gone.

In darker afternoons the temperature drops and a low mist forms on the ditches in the evening half-light.  The autumn spider season brings morning hedges drenched with funnel webs. Their strands shine and shimmer only to fade from view once the dew dries.

In spring I watch the slow formation of oak galls. Parasitic wasps lay their eggs in the leaves which respond by building hard circular galls around them. The galls are small bombs of tannin and for hundreds of years there would have been a busy trade to gather and sell them. They were a valuable commodity used to make iron gall ink and tan leather. Now we pass by and hardly notice their existence.