Emelia French – Sun Room

27 Jan – 13th Feb 2021
In space M
Emelia French
Sun Room

A soft warm glow
The body is listening
With a heartfelt intelligence
And a hand to the soil
Practising subterranean logics

Prepare the atmosphere: arrange the space
Waiting for something to arrive
An almost imperceptible murmuring 
Sensing, intuiting, receiving, responding
My touch is light 
Things are left open 

Form entangling with action
A poetry of gestures and marks 
Exchanges, reciprocities
Interdependently growing forms 
A cosmic relationality 

Traces are stories of action 
Surface: the place where we meet
Felt on the edge of the skin 
Discolouration, dents, peelings, rust, stain, warping, shrinking, cracking
Material bathed in the sun 
Inclusions 

A quiet authority
And a trembling resonance 
Hovering just in reach
Between being something and nothing
Unpractised 

Poetic irregularities and variabilities
Word play and world play
The limits of language and representation
Similes, metaphors and meteors 
Composites and compost
Circulating associations
The reflection of a sunset speaks loudly of days

_

Emelia French (b. 1994, Taranaki, Aotearoa) is an artist and researcher living in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is currently completing her PhD in Visual Arts at AUT University. Her practice is processual and transdisciplinary and includes storytelling, ceramics, painting, photography, bookmaking, metal-work and sculpture. 

The final line of this exhibition text, read as “The reflection of the sunset speaks loudly of days”, is a sentiment borrowed from Agnes Martin (journal entry, 1988).