EMILY RAE SMITH LABUSCHAGNE

Her practice spans painting, text, and objects, engaging with themes of meaning and memory. She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions and three solo shows: The Complexities of Parks and Their Fountains (2022, curated by Kerry Lee Chambers), Things Evaporate, but Never Disappear (2022, Doar Contemporary), and Playroom (2023, Under Projects).

In addition to her visual work, Emily published a poetry bundle, Two Toads and Other Poems (2023, Index Collective), and participated in Sessions (2023), a collaborative project led by Dominique Edwards.

‘Playing her pastel palette like the pied piper, Emily wanders into a world of nostalgia chasing the ephemeral sensations of childhood to wherever they lead. Dreamy recollections, that with every remembrance, have the potential to shape shift into the world of the reimagined, the reinvented.

An initial daubing of paint on the canvas, the blocking out of colours, set the scene for Emily to discover the details as she works, the images emerging like shapes taking form in the clouds. Deeply rooted within her work and intimated by her pastel tones (a reduction of saturated colour) lies the concept of echoes, of an impression left over from a moment in time, no longer in technicolour but indelible, nonetheless. And then come the words. The surface naiveté of her paintings: the playfulness of sprinklers in a garden on a summer’s day, a pastel inner tube floating in a pool, a pretty poodle, or a tumbling confectionery, hold beneath their innocent layer of frosting and delight, a deeper and sometimes darker sense of the world hinted at by the interplay of her images with their titles. With each word comes the whisper of a story: tales of whimsy touched with sorrow, of innocence giving way to experience, of life walking hand in hand with death. The melancholy of moments that are lost and the anticipation of moments yet to come.’

—Lindsay Klein

Courtesy THK Gallery, Cape Town/Cologne.