Mid-Air & Middle Ground, a solo exhibition of works at Custom House Studios and Gallery, Westport 2024

Mid-air: a place of movement, release and expansion; a place of weight and weightlessness; a place without connection and boundary; a place of joy and fear, chaos and focus; a place of possibility.

Middle ground: a place of vulnerability and bravery; a place of reconciliation; a place of resolution; a place of compromise and acceptance; a place from where we may find a way forward; a place of potential.

These figurative works explore themes of performance, embodiment and our ability to embrace uncertainty. They invite the viewer to consider the experience of inhabiting their own bodies not just in a physical way but also in an emotional and cerebral way.
My compositions are carefully selected moments of performance chosen for their connection to my own personal experiences and feelings of empathy towards the roles played by the figures. The investigative process of rendering them in paint imbues each piece with my own story but in extension to this, these works reach towards the viewer and seek empathy for a shared human experience.

I am interested in our ability to cope with adverse situations and find the inner strength to continue despite discomfort, fear or threat. The figures that inhabit my works find themselves caught in positions that are difficult to maintain, learning to cope and find a way to endure or even find comfort in their discomfort. The element of performance is important here. We may experience degrees of a wide range of emotions through art while safely remaining the viewer. These emotional experiences link with empathy and may lead us to consider our own stories and reflect on our capacity for resilience.

These works were all exhibited in an exhibition titled Mid-Air & Middle Ground at Custom House Studios and Gallery from September 26th to October 20th 2024.

Dr Tamsin Cavaliero of the Social Science Dept in Atlantic Technical Univeristy was my mentor for four months spanning 2021-2022. She guided my research for this body of work and enriched my thinking. I asked her to launch the exhibition and these were her opening remarks:

“I’m so delighted to be here tonight with Emma at her exhibition. I feel very emotional seeing all her work in one place and what an honour it has been to witness her work process. When thinking about what to say tonight I went back through the notes that I’d taken during all our fascinating discussions and I’m hoping that I can give you an insight into the themes and Emma’s amazing work. The visits took place over a period of 4 months in Emma’s studio from November 2021 through to February 2022. This body of work came out of a world turned upside down. Lockdown and seismic geopolitical events that changed how we lived, learned, related and understood our world and our physical reality. Moving through time periods of uncertainty, transitions, illness and failing bodies. Experiencing the feeling of constraints and being hemmed in and unbecoming. Moving into liminal spaces, embracing uncertainty and emerging towards a space of becoming.

Emma’s work with the performance artists Angelique, Mish and Emmen explores ideas of resilience, learning to find comfort in discomfort, and entering a state of flow. Finding a new set of skills to cope in a new way of living. The anthropologist Victor Turner proposed the idea of a ‘somatic society’ in which ‘our present political problems and social anxieties are frequently transferred to the body’. After the digital realm that we have been experiencing we have the desire to return to the physical realm and a rebuilding of trust. Trusting in the body and the physical again, embracing the awareness of tacit understanding and Embodied knowledge, exploring and moving towards – multiple becomings and identities.

During the first phase of this project your sessions with these fabulous performance artists occurred within the constraints of social distancing measures so movements took place individually. After you created the first drawings and paintings of the performers there was a sense of potentiality, new beginnings, opportunity and expansion. Also, something like the thawing of winter and the energy of Spring. There was a sense of getting bigger, taking a step up and outwards into a larger performance space to reach a wider audience as you prepared to meet with the performers again this time without social distancing measures which created opportunities for work as triad, as a group. We reflected on processing emotions, particularly ideas of forgiveness which can allow us to move forward and towards in order to maintain the highly present relationship of trust necessary for performance. There was discussion about expectations – do performers have higher expectations of themselves and others because the stakes are so high?

The images created during your collaboration with the performers and captured so exquisitely by you offered a new perspective – the different bodily positions created an embodied language, a way in, a way to respond to one another. Just as Myths express all human life and emotion by depicting scenarios that show us humans how to respond – how to find our way through life so the paintings are a cipher a way into an intimate system of communicating.

Your paintings hold us in a state of suspension. They create invitations – holding open a space, a portal, a possibility to reflect on our own lived experiences and consider a new way of being, a new world order? A remembering? You invite me to consider a new perspective a new way of looking at the world, viewing the world from the other side, the other way round. This possibility seems to be full of potential opportunities to embrace trust and nascent becomings and emergings. John Keats spoke about the idea of negative capability – the artist as being capable of being in a state of suspension – as Keats described it “being capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.” We look at these incredible images that capture the movement, potentiality, energy, points in time, moments, at a threshold?”

 

 

With sincere thanks to The Arts Council, Dr. Tamsin Cavaliero, David Smith and performers Angelique Ross, Michelle Thoburn and Emmen Jude Donnelly who all played key roles in the development of this body of works. Special thanks to all at Custom House Studios & Gallery.