EMILY HARTLEY-SKUDDER

For this exhibition, Emily has painted a series of fourteen small, single-object portraits, many of which are caught mid-splash, being doused in clear and colourful liquids. Their colours conjure memories of pastel icing on children’s animal biscuits, in combination with the crystallized droplets of flash photography in product advertising.

Interested in the relationship between paintings and their surrounding environments, this new suite of works will sit within a setting of lino floor tiles, complemented by some of the artist’s signature bathroom ceramics. Many of these new paintings include oozing cosmetics and ambiguous but anatomically suggestive implements, playing with our sense of repulsion and attraction and linking objects to the expectations we place on our bodies. The scene will be set as a showroom and these glistening still lifes could be read as strange advertisements, although, the artist admits, “you are never quite sure what the paintings are actually trying to sell.”