EMMA STIBBON

From October to December 2010, the artist Emma Stibbon lived and worked in Rome as a Derek Hill Foundation scholar at the renowned British School at Rome. Here, she could immerse herself in the city’s historically-charged architecture and internalise the diverse symbolic codes of different historic buildings. Stibbon is primarily interested in what she calls the fragility of the monumental or the supposedly permanent. This idea of utopian architecture’s fragility is underscored by the delicate character of her medium–masterful architectural drawings and cityscapes with white chalk or ink on paper or chalk on black-primed wood fibreboard. In her earlier ‘Berlin’ series, the viewer is confronted with an artistic investigation of how one government can appropriate the architecture of earlier governments in order to legitimate its own system.