Emma Tighe
About
These works are about time, memory and consciousness. Referencing the alchemy in the creation of the self, the works are an attempt to convey the inner workings of a consciousness; collective and multifaceted, often antithetical, all encompassing. Through a collage of psychotropic image recall and the oratorical function of story and song in the memory.
Emma Tighe(b.1989, London) lives and works in London. After completing a BA Fine Art Print and Time Based Media at Wimbledon College of Art, she worked in post production and VFX before moving to Florence to study painting, returning to London to join the RCA. She curated Mal(e)Fe+asance, Ugly Duck, London (2020) and co-curated In The Fog, Dyson Gallery, Royal College Of Art, London(2020). Recent group shows include Elbow Room, South Kiosk, Bussey Building, London(2020), 302_redirect, online arts festival (2020) and Capped Out, The Old Biscuit Factory, London (2019).
Statement
Working across various media including painting, print and moving image, the work is focused on rhizome connectivity and the experience of time. Making reference to antiquity, alchemy and the search for understanding as well as contemporary creations of networks in a post internet age, Emma Tighe looks to create a response to the post modern condition at intersection of monumental and cyclical time. Questions surrounding consciousness at all levels are examined through an excavation and compilation of western gnosis, and a practical knowledge and experience of information technology in a post digital age and what slippage exists between them. As a means of world building and divination, the work is an exploration into the epistemology of visual communication in contemporary society, through conversation and contemplation of the creation of objects. A rhizomatic relationship between maker and environment, that connect and transfer across great expanses, and sprout up through the dirt and detritus, the objects made after the fact, are a result of research, exchange, external factors and labour. The following are some of the multiplicitous results.
Cósa Púca Chorus
Interactive 3d scene containing 10 moving image pieces, each pertaining to a circle of the Inferno and its entrance.
This series, 'Cósa Púca Chorus' (pronounced Ko-shah poo-ka), referring to an oratory term for poisonous or magic mushroom in Gaelic, is narrated by a mycelium network of sentient fungi, mapping the descent into the underworld guided by fungal families. Poiesis experiments in consciousness are spoken over views of landscapes and 3d scenes in a collage of images recalled by the narrator, punctuated by the singing of Irish rebel songs, performed by the artists paternal grandfather, John "Jack" Tighe. Mirroring Dante’s Inferno, the underground network is illustrated by concentric circles. Being more closely linked in ancestry to animals than plants, these narratives propose a voiced consciousness, in the first person plural, attempting to elucidate a multiplicity of personas and perspectives within a soliloquy. Ancient sentience existing underfoot, a consciousness that expands within the limitlessness of the digital.
Medium: Moving image works and 3d model
Purgatory Practice
Experiments with aspects of time and connected associations forming points of tension. The textile piece contains hours of labour and various different material forms from embroidery, mushroom ink to oil paints. The assemblage is an experiment in the expression of a multiplicity beyond philosophical metaphor, lines of flight that entangle and attempt to escape that canvas stretcher. The purgatory of labour and the manifestation of practice accumulate over time, as strain is exerted over fabric, reused and repurposed, pierced and painted over, work to occupy the hands and mind as the world beyond ones control descends into entropy and chaos. Made in the build up to Brexit and the 2019 UK election, and abandoned for months in the RCA studios.
Archiving Paradise
Archiving experiments in the pressure applied to organic materials onto paper, spores and inks from mushrooms collected on walks.
If hell is other people, the lack of an exit from this new normal might be eased through voluntary solitude, paradise may be found picking mushrooms, spreading spores, interacting with and identifying fungal friends. The imprints of gills and the residue of spores, like an aura reading of the earth underfoot during the Anthropocene.
Medium: Mushroom ink and spores prints with watercolour