May Day May Day May Day
May Day May Day May Day, at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, was Emilie’s third major solo show comprising entirely new work made during Lockdown and the Covid pandemic. As with her Edgelands exhibition which toured from Oldham to Stoke on Trent, Birkenhead and Farnham in 2017-18, and 2019’s Beating the Bounds in London, the new body of work continued a narrative focus on the lives of women and girls, but wove around the storytelling open ended streamers for interpretation and conjecture.
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Edgelands
Emilie made six new pots for this, her first wholly commissioned exhibition. Three pots were inspired by a girl who played too far out and went under. Three pots were inspired by the girl’s mother, who scoured the earth for her lost daughter. The lost girl pots were flecked with gold. The mother’s pots the colour of soil.
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Beating the Bounds
Beating the Bounds, at Bosse & Baum in 2019, reflected on Emilies own experience of becoming a Mother and her changing relationship with her own body and the urban landscape around her. These assertive pots and boulders that created and claimed space - public space, gallery space - were inspired by the Kudduru used by the Kassites of Ancient Mesopotamia. With the Akkadian meaning of 'frontier' or 'boundary', Kudduru’s were stone blocks or slabs functioning as documents of land grants with their mostly image-based engravings holding the clauses of the contract. Here the forms are vessels as well as boulders.
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