Twelve new works by Emma Hart punch their way into Art Exchange, demanding that everyday emotions are allowed in.
Emma Hart believes there is a gap between how things are experienced and how they might look photographed. The overwhelming real we stumble through is split from the way digital culture references it and smoothes it all over. Ceramics, a relatively new material for Emma Hart, provides a way to work behind images and reveal the raw, crude state of things images screen off. An outpouring of hair and those clumsy spills we all make from time to time inhabit one side of the gallery, while ceramic fists cry, clutch their stomach, catch coughs and throw a punch, on the other. Integrated into the sculptures are film, photography and sound elements that contradict their glossy finish with their subject matter – a road side gutter, sweaty arms, a bum with knickers wedged up its crack, or a coughed-up film that falls on you, seemingly infecting your skin.
In the background a radio plays, spewing out a diary recorded by Hart when her young daughter was too ill to eat. She tells us: “It would have been a bit insane for me if I had made work about the internet, or globalisation, or commodity fetish – all those usual hot topics, when my daughter hasn’t been able to eat for two weeks. Why are some topics not cool in the visual arts? Making work about your children is not cool, or being old, or tired, or squashed on the bus”.
Through offering a multi-layered and fractured experience of sculpture, image and autobiography, room for a lived experience is created that insists we consider the emotions and experiences that make up everyday life.
Emma Hart, Spread – Exhibition Text (PDF)
Emma Hart (b. 1974, London) lives and works in London and has presented exhibitions and performances in the UK and internationally. These include solo exhibitions: Giving It All That, Folkestone Triennial (2014); Dirty Looks, Camden Arts Centre (2013); M20 Death Drives, Whitstable Biennale, Whitstable (2012); TO DO, Matt’s Gallery, London. Recent group exhibitions include: Hey I’m Mr.Poetic, Wysing Arts Centre (2014); Bloody English, OHWOW Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); The World Turned Upside Down, Mead Gallery, Coventry (2013); Night and Day, Modern Art Oxford (2010). Hart was awarded a Random Acts commission for The Jarman Awards 2013, broadcasted on Channel Four in 2014. In 2012 she was shortlisted for the Jerwood /Film and Video Umbrella Awards: Tomorrow Never Knows, with an exhibition at Jerwood Space, London. She received an MA in Fine Art from the Slade in 2004 and completed her PhD in Fine Art at Kingston University in 2013. Hart teaches at Central St Martin’s, London on the BA Fine Art.
This Exhibition is devised in collaboration with Grand Union, Birmingham where it will tour, Autumn 2015.