Artistes en Arctique

Today we are pursuing our presentation of the artists in the Arctic with Emilie Wright, a Melbourne-based artist whose studio practice spans a range of mediums, with a particular focus on drawing, sculpture, video and installation. Through a critical engagement with crude materials, elemental components and alchemical process, her work expands upon notions of drawing through large-scale installations that explore materiality, impermanence, transformation and entropy..

Having obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Expanded Studio Practice) at RMIT University, Emilie received a Department of Education Global Mobility Scholarship to study in Hong Kong in 2015. That same year Emilie was selected as a project facilitator for the 30th Kaldor Public Art Project, Marina Abramović: In Residence, where she completed training in MAI technique with Lynsey Peisinger. She is currently studying Fine Art: Honours at Monash.

Prior to commencing her BFA, Emilie founded ARI Bower Gallery in 2010, working as Curator and Director until 2013. She currently works as a Lead Support Artist with Arts Access Victoria.

Her practice is concerned with processes of production through the collaboration with materials and objects that constitute experiences of being in the world, through the investigation of the properties of materials and the tensile and frictive forces that govern them. In the paring back of materials to essential expressions of base elements, predominantly earth and water, bodies of matter and their relation to human and non-human entities will be explored through a mimetic coalescence as she situates herself as medium to materials and process.

Her practice is currently an enquiry into shifting and unstable bodies of matter, and momentarily suspended, ephemeral mark making. Utilising chance and indeterminacy as primary modes of investigation her practice centers upon ideas of transformation, matter and energy through the use of elemental components, crude materials and reactive mediums. These ideas expand within a broad studio based process of experimentation from which elements are then distilled and presented as large-scale installations.

Most recently her practice has shifted towards a limited range of materials, predominantly earth and water and the engagement of various processes and forces that transform them. This project aims to investigate multiple sites as locations for the generation of material and trace. Both poetic and physical elements of the landscape are investigated through the articulation of infinite gestures and the temporary extraction and suspension of matter. Through the research of historical and current earth building techniques and meditative earth practices her work investigates labour, action, ritual and gesture through physical and material processes, whilst attempting to challenge traditional hylomorphic understandings of material structures and notions of landscape and nature.

Emilie will exhibit her work in Copenhagen in 2017.

Her residence project

Starting with an extensive archive of the sonic environment of this remote location, Emilie’s project will culminate in installations of temporary imagined structures upon the frozen ice, generating an exchange of labour with the local industry or craft group, in an attempt to learn, teach and share skills specific to this location.