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The Gallery at the London Interdisciplinary School is pleased to present recent works by Laura Emsley.
The exhibition continues Emsley’s ongoing project of folding human and art history back on itself, trying to encapsulate its entirety in an attempt to get a view of ourselves within the vastness of the cosmos and to process thoughts and feelings around how much longer we have as a species.
For Emsley, the cave is not so much an archaeological site as a conceptual return. Faced with the exhaustion of artistic and cultural narratives, she chooses a radical move backwards as a way forward.Her strategy is to find a starting point in the present such as the gallery wall. Calling to the deep past, the cave is materially summoned into the present. Plaster and paint, erupt into a cave/brain-painting and further transposed into a digital screening. Past and present become simultaneous. Linear becomes cyclical.
In other works plastic-based materials lay down a primary ground of decalcomania, a technique employed by the Surrealists to reveal the subconscious. Moving between chance and manipulation Emsley facilitates emerging images produced by these synthetics that resemble both geological formations and neural pathways. “I began using decalcomania as a method to lay down a primary ground, a cave wall. Starting from The Present with plastic based materials I found they have an inherent ability to create cave-like effects, as though the synthetic has some ancient memory of its organic origins and longs to return but can’t.”
Anxieties in the Anthropocene connect to the subliminal memory of Industrialising Modernism and back to the Palaeolithic where we first wired our psychic into the walls of the earth.These surfaces then become speculative sites of projection. Tentatively a circle becomes a world, an atom, a spiral. Matter appears to half remember other histories and forms. Fragments of abstraction, stylisation, perspective, photography and the digital are imaginatively synthesised through material transformations. Current physical space like quantum, holographic, pixels, circuits and flat screens infiltrate earlier pictorial models like Renaissance or Constructivism. Everything is filtered through the poly-primordial giving them a look that is both ancient and Sci-Fi.
These coded terrains are the landscapes enshrined in our central nervous systems. It is said that at the end of life, the whole of life flashes before our eyes and brain waves match patterns seen during memory recall, meditation, and dreaming. In POLYMANIAS, pouring, printing, painting, cutting, pasting, sticking and framing become a staging of collective memory on the brink of extinction.
Laura Emsley’s work spans across different media including video, papier-mâché and collage. Her projects are often site-specific such as at the ice-age caves, Pech Merle, France and The Cradle of Humankind, South Africa (UNESCO.) They involve field work followed by large scale installations. She has exhibited extensively internationally and in the UK including at Maison des Arts George Pompidou (France), Kunstinstitute Melly (Rotterdam) and recently with Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary and The Glucksman (Cork, Ireland.)
She was born in Cape Town, South Africa, completing a BA in fine art at UNISA in 1985, after which she relocated to the UK as a consequence of opposition to apartheid. This personal history of rupture left her feeling disconnected from the world. Her work involves strategies to navigate extreme fragmentation in a search for reconnection.
Since finishing an MA at the The Slade School of Fine Art in the 1990’s her practice has engaged in decolonising processes. Beginning from the personal and the specific, connections are made to deep time and questions of being human in an indifferent cosmos.
Her underlying method is collage. “To live is to structure and restructure. We are collage, endlessly reconfiguring fragments of an ever-changing world, briefly holding things together to steer our way through chaos. The great thing about art is it acts as a holding capsule in which complexity, difference and contradiction can coexist in a kind of gestalt. It creates a small delay, an intervention in time, slowing things down allowing us to process something more deeply, before it is lost to the relentless flow.”
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