We often like to take inspiration from practicing artists, going to see exhibitions, and discussing our ideas about the artwork and how it relates to things going on around us that we’re interested in. Here we are at Emma Hart’s current show BANGER at The Fruitmarket Gallery.

Emma Hart BANGER
The Fruitmarket Gallery
27 October 2018 – 3 February 2019

London based rising star Emma Hart (b.1974, London) makes sculpture, photography, film and installation. Her work is often badly-behaved and messy, challenging assumptions and stereotypes in her quest to make art to which everyone can relate. Shown here was a major recent work Mamma Mia!, made as part of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women which she won in 2016.

Mamma Mia! is an immersive, beguiling, engulfing installation. You look at it by walking through and around it, pushing your head up into a sequence of large ceramic heads/jugs/lamps which hang from the ceiling, projecting light in speech bubbles onto the floor.

We thought sound would have added to this exhibition, and created a more immersive and engaging experience.

The work takes the family as a familiar context: the heads/jugs/lamps hang in family groups, disrupted by slowly moving fans whose blades are ceramic knives, forks and spoons.

“The artist’s starting point was thinking about relationships. Relationships between family members and also how art makes relationships with it’s viewer.  She was particularly interested in how family relationships get infected or corrupted. How artwork or sculpture can infect or corrupt or project or get onto the viewer.  She used light as a way of exploring that idea. As a human, a mother, a person she’s thinking about the difference between what’s happening on the outside and what’s happening on the inside.”

Yvonne has been thinking about this idea and it has inspired her to write some short lines of poetry.