ARTISTS
Emma Talbot: Human/Nature
Emma Talbot has become known for her large-scale installations of painting on silk, a medium whose formal characteristics she finds suited to articulating a feminist discourse. Talbot combines painting, drawing, animation and large-scale sculpture with distinctive imagery, combining mythological and rhythmic motifs, vibrant colours and calligraphic texts to raise issues relating to ecopolitics and the environment. In her works, Talbot engages with questions such as 鈥榳hat is nature鈥� and how 鈥� or if 鈥� an ethical 鈥榬eturn鈥� to it is possible.
Human/Nature, newly commissioned for 螘螠危韦, is a monumental textile installation made of painted silk and an accompanying animation film entitled, You Are Not the Centre (inside the animal mind). In these 鈥� as in many of the artist鈥檚 works 鈥� there鈥檚 a female protagonist 鈥� a version of the artist herself 鈥� who is always searching and exploring, trying to make sense of the world. Here, she leaves the human sphere to enter the animal mind, trying to understand the world viewed from non-human perspectives. The figure lives through different sensory experiences as she encounters the olfactory world of the dog, the mind of a spider that plans to make complex webs, or the visual perceptions of deer and the anxiety responses of captive birds etc.
The large-scale painted silk hanging features chimaeras 鈥� monstrous human inventions combining different animals. Drawing on medieval animal illustrations and classical chimaera statues, this imagery symbolises human fantasies and the entangled relationships between humans, animals, and nature. The chimaera serves as a metaphor for the human Ego, our imaginings of the unknown, and the often monstrous ways we relate to the natural world. Together, these works seek to unravel human-nature entanglements and envision the possibility of alternative, more caring futures. The project was commissioned by EM危T and is a prologue to the major, forthcoming exhibition Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives curated by Katerina Gregos.
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Emma Talbot has become known for her large-scale installations of painting on silk, a medium whose formal characteristics she finds suited to articulating a feminist discourse. Talbot combines painting, drawing, animation and large-scale sculpture with distinctive imagery, combining mythological and rhythmic motifs, vibrant colours and calligraphic texts to raise issues relating to ecopolitics and the environment. In her works, Talbot engages with questions such as 鈥榳hat is nature鈥� and how 鈥� or if 鈥� an ethical 鈥榬eturn鈥� to it is possible.
Human/Nature, newly commissioned for 螘螠危韦, is a monumental textile installation made of painted silk and an accompanying animation film entitled, You Are Not the Centre (inside the animal mind). In these 鈥� as in many of the artist鈥檚 works 鈥� there鈥檚 a female protagonist 鈥� a version of the artist herself 鈥� who is always searching and exploring, trying to make sense of the world. Here, she leaves the human sphere to enter the animal mind, trying to understand the world viewed from non-human perspectives. The figure lives through different sensory experiences as she encounters the olfactory world of the dog, the mind of a spider that plans to make complex webs, or the visual perceptions of deer and the anxiety responses of captive birds etc.
The large-scale painted silk hanging features chimaeras 鈥� monstrous human inventions combining different animals. Drawing on medieval animal illustrations and classical chimaera statues, this imagery symbolises human fantasies and the entangled relationships between humans, animals, and nature. The chimaera serves as a metaphor for the human Ego, our imaginings of the unknown, and the often monstrous ways we relate to the natural world. Together, these works seek to unravel human-nature entanglements and envision the possibility of alternative, more caring futures. The project was commissioned by EM危T and is a prologue to the major, forthcoming exhibition Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives curated by Katerina Gregos.
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