Interview: Emma Talbot

Drawing is the basis of my work – I generate ideas through immediate drawing with watercolour on Khadi paper. There are some drawings in the exhibition that are good examples of the kinds of images I draw. I make them without any plan, just downloading what I’m thinking. Sometimes they also include text or can be abstract. Drawing opens out my thinking and can surprise me and once I see a subject emerging, I decide how best to develop the works. If there’s a particularly strong sequential narrative thread I want to pursue, I might make an animation by digitally cutting up and moving/animating my drawings. If I want something to be physically present with a non-linear narrative, I’d make silk hangings and if I wanted to crystallise an idea as a physically present thing, emphasized by its materiality, I’d make a 3d work. I deliberately don’t emphasise categorisations like ‘sculpture’ and ‘painting’ because they come with such big histories, that determine a lot about how they’re made. I prefer to think of my work as something free of determinants, in which anything could happen. It helps me feel a kind of liberation.

I wanted to find an equivalent surface for the hand-made paper of the drawings, that could be painted on a larger scale. I felt that the standard starting point of a rigid structure, a rectangular stretcher for making painting, came with a lot of historical decisions that had been made by someone else, and had a weight and flatness that I didn’t really like. I wanted to find something light, that I could potentially cut, shape or drape if I wanted. The silk works can occupy a very big space, but don’t feel heavy or monumental. The silk has a kind of breathing lightness to it. I wanted my work to have an equivalence to the lightness of thought – the immediacy of speech, suggestion, idea rather than a concrete weight. This seems to convey the continuing subject, the experience of being alive, in a way that feels appropriate. It also operates for me as a feminist gesture, finding your own language in which to articulate your thoughts and experience, even if they sit outside of normalized ways and means that are dominant. Also, there’s an ecological consideration – the works roll up or can be packed up very small, so their transport footprint is small.

I wanted to capture the experience of being alive – the way our consciousness guides us through experience. I wanted to articulate the layers of simultaneous thought as we individually and collectively apprehend the world; the personal, the universal, the entanglement of us and others, other beings, other things, the systems that contain us. I wanted to relay the function of thoughts in a head, how we speak, how we picture things, ourselves and other information about our space of existence. It sounds huge but we’re all doing it all the time, every day. Necessarily, this includes intimate personal emotive experience with knowledge and logic. I love the way we as humans weave in and out of storytelling all the time, the way we spin webs of understanding. It’s how we communicate. I really wanted to communicate ideas through the work.

The archetype of an elderly woman figure is one loaded with meaning – either celebrated for a kind of canny wisdom that quickly collapses into distrust (witches, crones in myth) or perceived as weak and incapable. I wanted to take an elderly woman and make her a protagonist, who had the most agency. Initially it was prompted by Klimt’s painting Three Ages of Woman, in which an elderly female figure stands naked, covering her face in shame. I wanted to redescribe her as strong, to reposition her in our consciousness. I was also imagining my own survival in a volatile future. So I decided she would perform the ultimate hero narrative – the Twelve Trials of Hercules. I noticed that all the trials of Hercules were ‘resolved’ through aggression, killing, capture, theft, colonization. I thought an elderly woman would attend to resolving these trials in ways that were more considered, caring and benevolent. In doing so, I realized the trials unpicked the dominant structures of power and it became a series of really interesting thought experiments.

We live in terrifying times. We’re all individual actors who have no choice but to exist within the collective situations of our times. We’re confronted with scenes of excess everywhere we turn - extreme weather; floods, wild fires, tornados and political crises, levels of austerity and profit, war and corruption. Within this, we’re trying to find a way forward, to imagine survival, and this instinct is very strong. Our terrible stories are laced with moments of bravery and love and care. Without hope we wouldn’t be able to continue. Without sharing experience, we can’t understand. I think, I hope, I’m reflecting humanness in the work – as it is, and as it could be imagined.

I follow what interests me. I start making very open drawings and see a set of thoughts emerging. Then I develop them through research – online searching, watching documentaries, listening to podcasts etc. I like to come up with ideas that involve complex narratives and leave open the space where sometimes I don’t initially understand how I can make sense of the thoughts I have, because that way I can come up with unexpected results and decisions. Through research I begin to find a way to visually structure my ideas. This is a really fun part of the work. I approach my work through curiosity – I want to learn and understand things, so my research can range through myth, history, biology, quantum physics, language or craft. I’m always pulling information into the work, because it interests me. I’m also always trying to extend the image making, so it isn’t something I’ve seen before.

I used to use quotes from other sources such as poems and songs, but in recent years all the texts are my own. I like to play with language and try to find efficient phrases that include a lot of information. But they’re also short, like our text messages – so they carry the identity of our times. The texts propose ideas and ask questions, they don’t try to tell the viewer what to think. Sometimes thoughts are very verbal, other times pictorial – so the work is trying to reflect that.

The painted hangings are conceived as a life. Our own lives fill our existence, so they had to be something that occupied the space fully. There’s a break at the centre, as you say, like an eye or an I of the self – a break where the interior self meets the exterior world. The scale of the work really does depend on the idea/concept of the work. How much things need to be human-size or not is a consideration. The 3D works are focused crystallisations of ideas, literally like 3d drawings, so they are the scale that makes that work.

I’m just about to install an exhibition in a huge space in Berlin, Kindl Museum. They have a space called Kesselhaus, which is giant, and I have made enormous painted hangings and 3D works for the space. The show opens in September for Berlin Art week and continues until May 2024. I’m also showing this year at The Model, Ireland, Museum Folkwang, Essen Germany, The Louisiana Museum and Aros Museum Denmark, Kunsthalle Giessen and Kunstmuseum Bonn in Germany and Dordrechts Museum, Krona and Nest in Holland.