This major exhibition debuts a new series of works developed for DCA by British artist Emma Talbot, drawing together the diverse facets of her practice to create a new, painterly world in the gallery for audiences to step into.Talbot’s work explores visual autobiography in a truly unique way. Through drawing, painting, animation and three-dimensional making, she articulates internal narratives as visual poems or associative ruminations, based on her own experience, memories and psychological projections.
Incorporating her own writing and references to other literary and poetic sources, Talbot combines painted text, figurative depiction, mark-making and pattern to shift the registers and readings of her work between the symbolic and the everyday. The imagery in her work is direct and hand-drawn, resulting in immediate, open, inventive representations of what is seen in the mind’s eye.
The relationship between the physical presence of the work and the fleeting nature of the subject is considered through particular materials: drawings on thin, hand-made papers are folded and painted works are made directly onto silk, which is sewn in sections to make hangings and installations. Her most recent three-dimensional pieces are constructed by hand with simple processes, such as papier-mâché, and stitched soft forms. Talbot will be exhibiting a new series of these works accompanied by further sound and animation pieces in the gallery.
Talbot’s work considers complex issues such as feminist theory and storytelling; ecopolitics and the natural world; and pertinent questions regarding our shifting relationships to technology, language and communication. For this exhibition, when our world is more uncertain than ever, Talbot imagines future environments where humankind has been flung out of a capitalist-driven society of digital technologies and must look towards more ancient and holistic ways of crafting, making and belonging to survive.
This new body of work at DCA has been in development for over two years, but everything has physically been created in the last six months of 2020, when Talbot’s thinking around a world-altering event or shift in the status quo has understandably been accelerated by the effects of the global pandemic we find ourselves in.
‘I’m imagining (without having to imagine really because it’s happening all around us), a huge crash of the systems we’ve been reliant on, and asking what we will notice, care about, think of as important, when we step out of the wreckage. I wanted to consider what would have to happen after such an event, how we (as an era/age of living humans) would continue with our lives’.
In her early research for this show, Talbot visited spaces in Dundee such as the The McManus Art Gallery and Museum and was struck by early 20th century Celtic revival paintings such as John Duncan’s 1911 work Riders of the Sidhe, which depicts a procession of mythical figures and creatures moving through an unknown Scottish landscape. Delving further into Celtic histories, she became very interested in the ancient tradition of ‘keening’. Keeners were professional mourners who would visit homes of the recently deceased to perform lamentations and keening songs to help escort souls from this world into the next. The artist’s thinking on these figures, who were often women, has formed the foundational story of this exhibition.
‘I liked the narrative premise of a group of women in the work, taking on our grief, guiding us out of a crash and into a space that tunes in to wider histories, ancient landscapes, the ghosts of the past, the wildness of nature but also a kind of magical, unexpected relationship with the unfamiliar.’
These women, or keeners, appear throughout the exhibition in different forms. The first painted silk work that confronts a viewer at the entrance to the gallery depicts the cataclysmic event or crash that reconfigures the world. The second huge silk work that cuts across the gallery shows these women moving through this newly broken world, exploring and being transported through fantastical landscapes by mythical birds, whilst ghostly apparitions float overhead. Elsewhere in the exhibition, three-dimensional works flanked by beautiful drawings bring these women into physical form and capture them in different acts of gathering, striving, journeying and exploring.
All of these narrative threads are drawn together and infused with movement and sound in Talbot’s new animation Keening Songs. Punctuated by the artist’s poetic texts and accompanied by an other-worldly soundtrack of percussive rhythms, electronic melodies and wailing vocal intonations, we see these women move and mourn and care for one another, encountering different animals, ghosts and unknown spirits along the way.
With this new body of work, Talbot invites us to imagine these unknown futures together and think carefully about how we move through our contemporary moment of undeniable uncertainty and change. As can be read at the end of the eponymous silk painting Ghost Calls in the gallery: This is not the end / let’s use the time we have together / embracing / a forward movement without fear.
Text: Eoin Dara
Photography: Ruth Clark
