Emma Bolland South Yorkshire, United Kingdom
I am an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator.
I currently practice across painting, print, text, performance, drawing, sound, and moving image. I write across disciplines, both academically and creatively, and have translated screenplays from French to English. My current project, working title Three Building, uses the abstraction to ask questons of patent autonomy in relaton to the architectures of ‘total institutions’, such as psychiatric hospitals, asylums and prisons, to artculate experiences of psychosis and notions of loss and retrieval. The use of abstraction is a strategy to ‘lift the burden of representation’ and allow it's materiality and form (to paraphrase Briony Fer in relation to Soviet Constructivism), to enable a personal-societal ‘thinking outside of the moment’—to project outside of the present into past and future. It embraces Anna Stetsenko’s ideas of the s/objective—subjectivity as socially objective—and memory as a politcal, forward-looking act. I take pleasure in materials, process, colour, and form across all the methods I employ, and, with the artist Gary Simmonds, am one half of Sludgy Pink, a materiality focused research project which explores narratives of materiality and abstraction. My current writing project, Sky Tangents from Clock Tower, builds on previous publications such as my monograph Instructions From Light (JOANpublishing, 2023), to speak in the voices of buildings and their inhabiants and is a companion process to those of Three Building. I co-edit, (with Rachel Smith), the publishing project intergraphia, publishing and working with artists and writers such as Sharon Kivland, Derek Beaulieu, Akeem Balogun, Clee Claire Lee, Karenjit Sandhu, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and more.
