Often grounded in her own experiences and feelings, Emma Hart's sculptural works combine ceramics, photography, painting, and video in an exploration of the social function of language and speaking. Hart was the winner of the biennial Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2016.
Read MoreEmma Hart received her MA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2004 and her PhD from Kingston University, London in 2013.
Awkwardness, induced in social situations or self-consciously, is a recurring theme in Emma Hart's work. Ceramic body parts or objects often appear to be sweating or spilling out, visualising the anxieties one encounters in everyday life.
Many of Hart's works take her own sentiments—anxieties, embarrassment, and awkwardness—as points of departure to examine social situations and relations. The tongue, for example, features heavily in her earlier work and in the sculptural installations presented at her 2013 solo exhibition Dirty Looks at Camden Arts Centre, London. Rendered in ceramic, the tongues adorned open drawers filled with scribbled notes, supported thin slabs of ceramics, and protruded from the walls.
Inspired by Hart's experience of working in a call centre, the sculptural works reflect the pressure of constant speech while revealing the chaotic side of professional life. The tongue also draws parallels between its ambiguous anatomical status and the nature of call centres: an organ that usually resides inside the mouth, but can be brought outside; and a private corporation, though one that intrudes into people's privacy through personal phone calls.
In other works, Hart has explored verbal speech and its potential to produce awkward situations, social hierarchies, and class groups. The installation Big Mouth (2021) consists of round targets, whose circular patterns suggest faces, and arrows with fletchings that resemble green eyeballs. Mounted on the wall in rows, the targets appear to be staring back, suggesting, along with the ominous title, the immediate aftermath of things that could have been left unsaid.
In 2016, Hart was awarded the Max Mara Art Prize for Women—organised jointly by London's Whitechapel Gallery and Reggio Emilia's Collezione Maramotti—that granted her a six-month residency to produce a major body of work. Spending her time in Milan, Todi, and Faenza, the artist studied the traditional ceramic technique of Faenza maiolica jugs to create large-scale ceramic 'heads'. Produced by inverting the shape of a maiolica jug, Hart's ceramics resemble the human head cut below the nose. When suspended from the ceiling and lit from the inside at Hart's solo exhibition Mamma Mia! in 2017, they cast light on the floor in the shape of speech bubbles, as if in conversation.
The apparent relationships between Hart's ceramic heads were, in part, inspired by her time at a centre for family therapy in Milan. There, she found parallels between the psychiatrist's effort to identify and analyse the behavioural patterns of her clients, and the ceramicists adorning maiolica jugs with patterns. The colourful patterns painted inside of Hart's works portray various relationships and private sentiments, from self-absorbed rows of heads in I, I, I or a woman overcome with jealousy in I WANT WHAT YOU'VE GOT, EVEN WHEN I AM ASLEEP (both 2017).
Emma Hart has held solo and group presentations internationally.
Select solo exhibitions include BIG MOUTH, Barakat Contemporary, Seoul (2021); Be Some Body, The Sunday Painter, London (2020); Mama Mia! Whitechapel Gallery, London and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia (2017); Love Life Acts 1, 2, and 3, with Jonathan Baldock, Peer Gallery, London, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (2016—2017); Giving It All That, Folkestone Triennial (2014); Dirty Looks, Camden Arts Centre, London (2013).
Select group exhibitions include Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules, Somerset House, London (2021); The Lie of The Land, Milton Keynes Gallery, U.K. (2019); Further Thoughts on Earthy Materials, Kunsthaus Hamburg (2018); In My Shoes, Arts Council Touring Exhibition, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2018); Dear Luxembourg, Nosbaum Reding Project, Luxembourg (2015).
Emma Hart's website can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
