NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein is pleased to present the exhibition Open Thoughts by British artist Emma Talbot. During the course of several years Emma Talbot created a dense and original oeuvre. Her artistic practice originates in drawing, but her installations and sculptures can be seen as three-dimensional drawings as well. Thus complex nettings in form, language and image arise, which entail an oscillating pull in the momentum of the line and the seemingly psychedelic colouring.
Talbot establishes a hypnotic as well as lyrically transfigured narration composed of passion, grief, melancholy and ennui. In the interplay between image and text the private account comprises a haunting confrontation of the observer with the topoi of life and death and accompanying states of anxiety. Talbots protagonists are tenderly drawn creatures with a childlike aesthetic, constantly moving, in a state of flux. Though in the narrative sequence their timelessly engrossed innocence contrasts a radically differentiated world. In Emma Talbots intermedia oeuvre dreamful imagination and contemporary existence are linked. Thus an undefined persona between voyeur and empathic friend is assigned to the spectator.
Furthermore paintings and drawings integrate handwritten text elements in the tight structure of the narration. These poetically connected strings of words raise incoherent questions and intellectual pastimes and cross-link with the ornamental imagery. Talbot challenges the social position of the individual via graphic depiction of the technical tools of communication such as mobile telephones or the setting of her tales in a diffuse threshold region between private and public space.
