Emma Talbot: Ghost Calls and Meditations / Vanessa Billy: We Become

In Emma Talbot’s (b. 1969, UK) work across several mediums, drawing is always the starting point for her explorations of some of the most urgent questions of our time, from feminist theory and psychoanalysis to ecopolitics and the natural environment and our shifting relationships to technology, language and communication. Her radiant painted silk hangings and the related animations recall both dream diary and automatic drawing, often connecting word and image to express the lyricism and the pain of subjectivity. Incorporating her own writing as well as references to other literary and poetic sources, Talbot combines painted text, figurative depiction, mark-making and pattern. Her most recent three-dimensional pieces are constructed by hand through simple techniques, such as papier-mâché and stitched soft forms. For this exhibition, when our world is more uncertain than ever, Talbot interweaves the aftermath of the crash of our systems and interpretations of wild and impressive landscapes. These are stories of reconnection with ancient mythology and holistic ways of crafting, making and belonging to survive - all conveyed through a group of keening women.

Through drawing, painting, animation and sculptures, Emma Talbot explores the inner landscape of thoughts and emotions based on her own experiences and memories. These subjective responses are then cast into wider narratives, addressing prevalent contemporary concerns. The shift of registers and readings of her work between the symbolic and the everyday, the autobiographical and the collective, is expressed in the intertwining of text and image in a form of visual poetry.

The exhibition focuses primarily, however, on Talbot’s research into the ancient Celtic tradition of “keening.” Keeners were professional mourners, often women, who would visit homes of the recently deceased to perform lamentations and keening songs to help escort souls from this world into the next. These women appear throughout the exhibition in different forms: depicting the cataclysmic event that reconfigures the world; moving through this newly broken world; and exploring and being transported through fantastical landscapes by mythical birds, whilst ghostly apparitions float overhead. All of these narrative threads are drawn together and combined with movement and sound in Talbot’s new animation Keening Songs. Here, we see these women move and mourn and care for one another, encountering different animals, ghosts and unknown spirits along the way.

In 2020 Emma Talbot was awarded the 8th Mara Art Prize for Women, a biannual award established in 2005 in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery in London and Maramotti Foundation in Italy.

This exhibition has been produced in cooperation with Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland.

For several years Vanessa Billy (b. 1978, Geneva; lives and works in Zurich) has been a prominent Swiss artist, with a presence on the national and international exhibitions scene. She is concerned with the intrinsic and transformative properties of materials, with the materialisation of processes of constant exchange within our environment and between humans and other living beings. The artist uses a wide range of organic and synthetic materials and waste products, including bronze, silicone, bio-based resin, water, metals, waste oil, glass and plastics; as well as industrial objects such as electrical cables, car engines and light bulbs. Thematically, Billy’s sculptural practice explores ecological issues, energy cycles, dystopian visions and alchemical processes. She draws parallels between physical and mental constructs and questions the impact of human actions on the planet.

The exhibition We Become focuses on the themes of energy and transformation in Vanessa Billy’s work and its development over a period of fifteen years. It is a collaboration with the Villa Bernasconi in Lancy, near Geneva, which is showing the parallel exhibition Redevenir (September 4–November 14, 2021), with an emphasis on the human body.

Vanessa Billy makes sculpture as a way of situating herself in the world, of relating to the substances that provide our living conditions. She proposes environments where representations of animal, vegetal, mineral or microbial organisms merge with mechanical objects. At the heart of her work is the fusion of several opposing formal possibilities. She subjects matter, whether natural such as oil or resin, or constructed, such as surplus industrial electricity cables, to a process of transformation whose origins are difficult to trace. 

In recent works Vanessa Billy’s explorations of materiality have become more metaphorically explicit and more urgent in content. She is concerned with the entanglement of contemporary humans in the cycle of consumption and waste. However, they often have only an implied and fragmentary presence in her work. Instead, the artist focuses on humans’ relationship to the world, the results of their harmful interference with nature and their alienation from it. She incorporates manufactured materials and machinery in her installations, or employs natural materials such as sand, bird feathers and cow hide. She has also often used bio-based resin, exploiting the material’s viscous qualities: initially fluid, it sets over time, pouches of trapped air leaving their mark and forming a pattern recalling molecules or unicellular beings.

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