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.
The Kudduru starting point was evident in the large torso pots, with their references to re- claiming land by free-falling feminine forms. With the boulders, the Kudduru might still have been the muse, but they were different objects, solid and grounded, transformed as something beyond boundaries to become thresholds; vibrant forms with shapes and stories that sought to undermine their own borderlines. For if carrying children tells us anything, it is that bodies are not discreet and bounded objects. Bodies can change, and change with others – they are bundles of affects that shake and quiver, that are fluid and changing with each new encounter.
The maternal subject is a contested site for artist-women to explore. Here the maternal was storied through the experience of the artist-mother, as she moved from contorted images of m(o)therness towards togetherness and difference, as she reclaimed the city as well as herself. The situatedness present in this work allowed it to transverse several possible maternal voices, that take place through time and space, partially taking on the matrilineage of other artist- mothers. The maternal was thus represented in the work as well as imbuing it with maternal affect – as such, it functioned as a contest to maternal (phallogocentric) silencing and instead gave voice to the maternal-feminine.
Read the essay by Paula McCloskey
