Profile·London
Collector Helen Sunderland-Cohen on Three Collections, Slow Looking and Her Frieze Week Rituals
In The Art Newspaper's Frieze London 2026 interview series, the London lawyer and map collector Helen Sunderland-Cohen talks through her three collections — historic maps, fictional cartography and contemporary art — and names what she is catching around London this week.
The London-based lawyer Helen Sunderland-Cohen looks after three collections. She is custodian of the Sunderland Collection, the trove of rare historical maps, atlases and globes assembled by her father Neil; she founded Ex Carta in 2024, a collection devoted to fictional and literary maps; and she collects contemporary art purely on instinct, living with the work in her central London home. Her personal holdings include recent paintings by Nick Goss, abstract work by Prunella Clough and a painted wooden mask by Yinka Shonibare.
Her buying habits are deliberate rather than impulsive. The first serious purchase she recalls was a 1970s photograph by the feminist artist Alexis Hunter, a self-portrait caught in a mirror; the most recent was a watercolour from the Bird Hunter series by the Pakistani artist Ali Kazim. She rarely buys on the spot, preferring to spend time understanding a work and its maker, ideally by meeting the artist and training the eye through sustained looking. The map collections run on a different track: the historic one concentrates on world maps and celestial cartography up to around 1700, while Ex Carta gathers literary and worldbuilding maps, ideally from first editions, with quality the shared thread.
Both cartographic projects have a public life beyond storage. The entire historic map collection was digitised in 2021 and is browsable through the Oculi Mundi platform, and selections from Ex Carta are currently on view at the Zurich Central Library in an exhibition of fantastical maps from legendary stories running until 5 December. A second show, Night Maps, opens at London's Warburg Institute on 21 October.
October in London is mapped out like an itinerary. She hopes to catch Richard Dadd at the Royal Academy of Arts, Henry Moore at Kew Gardens and Ana Mendieta at Tate Modern. During Frieze London she eats at the fair's Jikoni stand, and she is looking forward to a party for The Soothsayer's Chorus, an exhibition co-curated by Beth Greenacre and Bettina Prentice at Pink Floyd's former recording studio near King's Cross.
