Almost a decade after becoming the Turner’s second youngest winner, the artist talks about her dazzling new opera sets, her paper bag collection – and the sadness she felt when her work was wildly misinterpreted‘I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard,” says Helen Marten. “I’ve literally not taken a day off for four months.” The artist is talking about 30 Blizzards, a two-hour opera for which she was commissioned, by Art Basel Paris and the fashion brand Miu Miu, to write the libretto and design the staging. Featuring 30 main characters – named things like The Mother, The Baker, The Asphalt, The Forest – and a chorus collectively called Dust, the whole piece moves from “deepest night through all of these iterations of the day – dawn, afternoon, then back to deepest night”. It will take place in a space 200 metres long, with the audience able to mingle with the performers throughout.It sounds exhausting, but Marten, by her own admission, is “a total workaholic”. During our lengthy cha...