| The most important part of my work is the translation of interior thought into narrative image. For quite a while, my paintings operated as a loose painted collage of images from photographs found in magazines. This involved lots of sifting through magazines, photocopying or ripping out pages, and looking for the right images to paint from to tell the story of my ideas. I used archive material from old magazines in libraries (I didn’t rip those pages), of interior spaces and fashion shoots, to attempt to construct a recognizable but altered language for contemporary narrative. | 
|
Emma Talbot
Emma Talbot, Lost on Some Horizon, 2008. Oil on board, 42 x 58 cm. Courtesy of the artist.The most important part of my work is the translation of interior thought into narrative image. For quite a while, my paintings operated as a loose painted collage of images from photographs found in magazines. This involved lots of sifting through magazines, photocopying or ripping out pages, and looking for the right images to paint from to tell the story of my ideas.
I used archive material from old magazines in libraries (I didn’t rip those pages), of interior spaces and fashion shoots, to attempt to construct a recognizable but altered language for contemporary narrative. In doing this, I was looking for a way of making mass culture serve a singular desire, an individual output from mass consciousness.
Of late, I’ve found that I’m less concerned with the description of appropriated stuff, and that I can happily rely on my own invention. In this regard, the spaces and images come about more easily, and are more fluid.
Drawing has become more important in my work, as a way of getting closer to my thinking. The figurative element is collapsing, like in the painting Sleeper (2008). I’m still interested in contemporary narratives. I went to quite an old-fashioned art school for my undergraduate degree, and realize that I have often been hounded by traditional concerns of right and wrong in relation to figuration (Bad School, 2008), and played with or bent those rules. Just painting from women’s magazines was a kind of statement about delighting in (in)appropriate material for narrative paintings, hopefully moving the reading of my work away from traditional or neo-classical narrative painting.
The subject matter of my work has often been about representations of women versus personal desire. The dirty materiality of the paint and tertiary colors aimed at getting close to a pleasurably perverse individual desire compared to the shiny, clean photographic images I started with. So, the paintings are often about a type of pleasure in looking, but extended to a pleasure in looking at the materiality of paint.
In recent paintings, the subject of loss is much more at the forefront. I’ve recently become a (relatively young) widow, and my paintings can’t deny this fact. The narratives are about existence, just the mere act of being (Being and Nothingness, 2008). They are about the wish that there’s an “other side” (The Hanged Man, 2008). They are perhaps a bit sad, portraying the fact that living can be like waiting somewhere when you are the one left alive.
