Emilie made six new pots for this, her first wholly commissioned solo exhibition at Gallery Oldham in Greater Manchester. 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.
Emilie remembered growing up in Sheffield; she and her friends would gather in a city park in trainers in winter, bare foot in summer. She felt able to move freely and stand strongly. They were teenagers with everything to live for. Looking for images for the new pots, Emilie went back to that park. She asked old friends to meet her by the big tree, in the clothes they used to wear and she took photos of them doing what they used to, when they played there at the edgelands of childhood.
Teenagers who gather in parks are often told they’re going nowhere. They rock back and forth on swings they used to swing high on; spin on roundabouts that are now too small for them. They hang about, fantasise and experiment. Their play can go well. Their play can also go awry. Especially for girls who go off on their own. There’s a South Yorkshire poem called Woods Beyond a Cornfield by Stanley Cook that got beneath Emilie’s skin. Cook’s South Yorkshire is brutal – poor, hard – and beautiful. His poem’s translucent descriptions of the worked countryside thread through the story of a girl who was murdered by a local man on the day she played truant from school: “lost for something to do.”
No landscape guarantees safety to a girl who wanders. As Emilie started work on these pots, news emerged about the grooming and abuse of girls in nearby Rotherham. Emilie – a former drugs worker – called her Exhibition Edgelands because she is interested in the ‘people who are existing in gaps.’ The Greek goddess, Persephone, resonated with her. Persephone was the daughter of Demeter and Zeus. Out playing one day, picking flowers, she was entranced by a particular narcissus. It was a trick. When she picked the tempting flower, the earth broke open and she was dragged down, screaming, into the Underworld. Her abductor was Hades. The modern world that Emilie created on these pots is haunted by the Persephone myth.
Edgelands toured to the Potteries Museum, Stoke on Trent, The Williamson, Birkenhead and The Craft Study Centre, Farnham.
Read the essay by Francis Byrnes
