Critical Practice
Emma Tighe
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).
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.
Rhizome Inferno — To use the filter, open up Snapchat. Make sure you're on the camera as if you were about to Snapchat a photo. Point the camera at the snapcode. Press and hold the screen over the snapcode.
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 — Satin, gesso, oil, mushroom ink, embroidery 135(w)x160(h)cm 2019
Purgatory practice(detail) — Satin, gesso, oil, mushroom ink, embroidery 135(w)x160(h)cm 2019
Untitled — Satin, velvet, gesso, oil, embroidery, bulldog clips, embroidery hoop 2019
Untitled — Satin, velvet, rayon, cotton, bulldog clips 2019
paradiso archive — Mushroom ink and spores prints 25x15cm 2019
paradiso archive — Mushroom ink and spores prints 15x25cm 2019
paradiso blurs — Mushroom ink and spores prints with watercolour 30x15cm 2019
supernova — Mushroom ink and spores prints with watercolour 15x15cm 2019
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.