emma-turner.comEmma Turner
Painter and Mixed Media Artist
Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category
My Shadow is me and it is not me!
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010‘I blacked out your face, with every discarded feature I saw you more clearly, you were completed erased yet in my mind I saw you as if you were standing in front of me.
Maybe what I could see was the essense of you. the fabric that formed you. Your footprints and movements and all those ways you had about you.
It all makes sense now you’re absent, when I am not distracted by the sight of you. Maybe what I now see is your soul, it’s beautiful. I love it.’
First I should explain how I got here, in the dark that is. It all began by looking in the mirror. Constantly painting my self in the hope that my image would dissolve and I would discover there, in amongst the familiar the unfamiliar, to bring forth the unconscious, to create a painting that was an embodiment of all that I was feeling, but it was in vain. I was blind.
“Let them alone, they be blind leaders of the blind, and if the blind lead the blind both shall fall in to a ditch,” Matthew 15 verse 14.
I even took to painting myself blind folded and recently binding my hands. I wanted the act of painting to be transformative so I began with the obvious, I made masks and I studied Ovid’s Metamorphoses but something was lost in translation. The more I tried the more calculated and empty the paintings became.
The shadow represents for me everything I was searching for. It describes the self better than any symbol or metaphor I have found. The shadow is our intangible shape shifting double, our inseparable companion; it draws along our time line as if pursuing its own parallel existence on another plane. It describes the part of us that exists on the two dimensional plane on which all of our dreams are projected.
Shadows
Friday, September 3rd, 2010Despite really enjoying painting my shadow, the images never quite captured the qualities of the shadow that I was so drawn too. I felt the only way to achieve this would be to produce a film. It was something I had never done before so they have a very amateur feel, which in many ways adds to the unnerving but also playful experience of capturing ones shadow.
Vagabond
Friday, April 9th, 2010
The snail women were all drawn from imagination so what must determine their mood is the fluidity of my wandering thoughts? They started life on a train journey I was taking from Norwich to Cornwall. I was thinking about freedom, the melancholic drifter roaming the world taking its home with it. This also led me to think about what we take with us and what we leave behind. The works represent in many ways the continuing transformation we go through coming to terms with ourselves, our history, our experiences and our knowledge.
Mute
Sunday, April 5th, 2009Mute.
Mute is a short series of graphite drawings which depicts the frustration of a kind of ‘Artists block.’
The hands represent the artist struggling and flexing against the restraints of language, paint, paper, canvas… their inability to find the right chord, colour or image in order to express themselves.
Word Of Mouth
Thursday, September 4th, 2008Word of Mouth.
This series is concerned with a few stories which dominated the press during the summer of 2008.
These particular stories, stories of fathers taking the lives of their families, young boys and girls being murdered by other youths moved me in way that is still unresolved but I felt the need, an urgancy to make work to challenge our view of these crimes. Crimes that unfortunately we still hear about today.
I thought about innocence and the fragility of life. I thought about the tragic events that leads to a young man becoming a murderer or being murdered. I thought about what it means to be a moral person, to be niave and pure, all those qualities that are associated with youth. Icarus the boy preparing his wings before tragedy, Abraham, holy man of God prepared to take the life of his child and Moses, the king of the Jews, murdered an Eygptian soldier.
The series was intended for the large hall at Norwich School of Art and Design.
This space with high ceilings and granduar meant that I could hang the work as if they were stain glass windows in a church.
Dad
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006
This project was actually about my grandmother. Despite being very close after my grandmother passed away I discovered so much more about her whilst sorting through her belongings and letters. What I found most intriguing was the way in which my Dad recalled her. Stories of his childhood, what my grandmother was like when she was young, stories she had told him. I made several pieces about my own memories and moments with my grandmother but this particular work comes from a tape my dad made about her, that’s why his face appears in front of the writing, we are connected to it yet somehow it is removed from us. It is not our own.