Caught Playing
St Anne’s House, Bristol September 2024
“This exhibition is a backstage tour of my props cupboard.”
Emma’s first solo show in Bristol included sculpture and prints that hovered between abstraction and figuration alongside photographs of the artist at play. For the gallery information sheet including a list of works please click on the button to the right.
Above: digital prints of a collage made from a Victorian fashion engraving, one of a series. Considering Victorian attitudes towards women, decorum and dress, the artist improvised a crinoline from upvc piping and coffee sacks. On her body, it fell in a satisfying boob shape. She made another to create a pair. Worn together they created an hourglass form which prompted thought about her own breasts in relation to time. This, in turn, dictated the nature of the drippy droopy install. A body-sized photograph of the artist dancing as an hourglass hangs just out of shot but it appears in the carousel at the bottom of the page.
From the wane of the female form to its waxing and these twin peaks with their grappling hook-nipples and intricately branded surfaces. These taut symmetrical forms are under tension with bungie elastic holding them to the wall. (A gallery visitor sports a crinoline in the background.)
The photographs, performative and goofy, led the audience to expect a live art element which Emma devised during the first few days of the show. Called Chores, you will find stills from the event in the carousel at the bottom of this page.
The photograph on the right below was taken by Hammer Chen. In it, Emma waves a flag of William Morris curtain fabric, dressed in four tablecloths. The tablecloths were screen printed during four performances (THISS 24) in the garden at The Hide, Stroud (an artist’s retreat). THISS 24 and The Hide itself curated by Alice Sheppard Fidler.
Across the middle of the large space snakes a chorus line of skirts cut from repurposed builders’ ply. The hemlines rise and fall suggesting proscenium curtains. On the far side a group of ‘mat horns’: soft helter-skelter forms hand stitched from tea towels and retired clothing held erect by stint of their plaited coil-rug bases. Unusual forms simultaneously conjuring both kitchen and boudoir . On the near side, a collection of flats covered with tea towel fabric and rubbings of the sink at home (see below).
The show is full of drawn elements. Not only the scarified wave forms, crinolines and cones but also drawings in their own right. This charcoal one began with the screen printed red monoprint.
Below, on the carousel are exhibition shots of the following: Entrance and Exit (2023 - 24), Chores (live art performance 12 Sept 2024), props, costumes and scripts from the same performance, Dancing as an Hourglass (photograph by Ruby Turner 2024), Selection from 365 Drawings (2019), The Campaign (2020-22), Place Mat Horns (2022 - 24), In Service (photographs taken by Alice Sheppard Fidler 2024), Champion Showjumper (photograph taken by Ruby Turner 2024), Fork Fuck Boob Feed (T-shirt 2024) and the wall of research.
The smiley gent in the fleshy-coloured plinth costume is Jason Hird (Institute of Crazy Dancing). Jason co-hosted Chores.
