EMILY IMESON

Chaos and Compassion

(in a time like this)

9 – 20 November 2022

Opening Night:
Wednesday 9th November 2022, 6 – 8pm

Catalogue & Price List:
View PDF Catalogue

‘Chaos & Compassion’ VIEWING ROOM

Saint Cloche is delighted to welcome back much-loved Australian artist Emily Imeson to reveal Chaos and Compassion. We are very proud to announce that Emily has recently been announced the winner of the Paddington Art Prize 2022, a national acquisitive landscape painting prize inspired by the Australian landscape. As one of our stable of artists, we couldn’t be prouder! 

It has been a true joy and honour to work with Emily over the years and witness her passion and dedication. 

Chaos and Compassion (in a time like this) contemplates currents times and invites a fragmentation of materials; acts of separating parts to rethink the whole. Acts which also enact the affectivity of humans upon the earth where Imeson’s processes, guided by compassion, aim to rethread, rebuild, and remake. This simultaneously becomes a destructive and generative journey, methods of recycling are implicated aiming to find new possibilities. 

Emily works with the opposing mediums of acrylic paint and soil as a way to accept the state of the world; plastic now embedded in the geology of the world, our food chain, and our blood, but also to explore the ecological truism which is the intrinsic interconnectedness of everything. The total dependence things have with things, symbiosis and the adaptability of the world. 

Additionally, an installation invites viewers to engage with loosely formed scrolls of artworks in an open space, exploring the notions of perspective, an immersive experience where we as spectators become part of the art. 

Emily explains, “The scrolls weaving through the space are intended to simultaneously interrupt as well as activate perception. The intention is to encourage an intimate, immersed encounter with materials considered as ‘soiled’ and ‘waste’. The scrolls are systems of recycling, where discarded paintings and studio remnants are repurposed into new forms inscribed with process and the act of making/remaking.” 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Through her practice, Emily explores how landscape painting can respond to twenty-first-century effects of the rapidly changing climate. Her practice fulfils an innate desire to understand human/nonhuman relationships where works becomes a site for interconnectedness. She questions what it is to do landscape painting in these times and uses paint as a medium to prompt reflexivity on human-world relationships.

In 2021, Emily undertook an Honours in Visual Arts at Southern Cross University (SCU), supported by the School of Social Science Honours Scholarship. She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from SCU and was granted a Rising Star Scholarship for these studies, graduating June 2016. 2016 -18 Emily received a Young Regional Artists Scholarship from Create NSW to continue developing her practice.

Driven by desires to coexist on the planet Emily continuously takes herself into the land, exploring ways to translate experience into paintings. Her works explore macro-micro worlds while also encouraging her audience to reflect on the affectivity of being part, in, and of this world.

Emily’s key accomplishments include being awarded the Paddington Art Prize in 2022 for her work ‘When the Mud Dries’ and the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize in 2019, ‘Alive in the Dead of Night’. Emily was a recipient of a Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, in 2020. Most recently Emily has been selected as a finalist in the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award 2022, the Mosman Art Prize 2022 and the Tweed Regional Art Prize 2022.

In 2021 Emily was part of a digital platform exhibition ‘The Arc of Happiness’ through Explore Contemporary 2021. In the same year, Emily joined forces with the Two Good Co, when they approached her to collaborate on Two Good’s Cookbook Two – Recipes of Resilience. Emily was asked to create paintings that would be translated into the chapter-openers and endpapers of the book.

Emily’s works have been acquired by the Macquarie Group, Ballina Shire Council, and is represented by Saint Cloche Gallery in Sydney.

As the world around changes, shifts, falls, is bombed and shattered, explodes, and floods, inevitably my world and the worlds within me change. We are morphing, trying, learning, growing. There is mess and confusion, things are uncertain, and I contemplate how to become-with this in painting, human-being and mother-to-be-ing. 

My body has morphed, as the flooded landscapes have, as these paintings have. It has been important not to eliminate the discomfort of this confusion and uncertainty, but accept it with care and concern; move through and with it to embody the plasticity of things, soil, fungi, brains, flesh, earth, plastic. Embody the plasticity of painting and its changeable state which allows things to move, be made and unmade, discovering new possibilities, imagining new futures.

These imaginings have developed as necessarily optimistic, where colour and playful mark making guide disordered times. Fast gestures are calmed by the timely processes of stitching and creating ‘earth-stained cotton’. Interactions with the soil, along with reading about the roles of fungi and composting have excited me, making this body of a work a celebration and an extension of care towards the worlds within worlds beneath our feet.

– Emily Imeson