Emma Elliott’s solo exhibition ‘Cry Me a River’ is an exhibition about heartbreak, that weaves together the emotional threads of love’s labour’s lost.
The centerpiece is an oversized human heart marble sculpture that Elliott carved as a personal challenge after separating from a significant relationship and navigating the rollercoaster of a new one. From this carrara marble heart a series of miniature slip-cast stoneware versions evolved, dubbed the ‘Don’t Ask’ series. Each delicate heart was shattered and repaired using a modern interpretation of the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi; where broken pottery is carefully restored using gold – a symbolic representation of fracture and healing. The shattering of the hearts is recorded on film, in painstaking slow motion, echoing the fragility of the human condition. Elliott invites you in to sit on the sob sofa and rock in out to your favourite tunes.
Emma Elliot, Cry Me a River, 2nd – 26th November, 2023, The Muse Gallery
Private View Thursday 2nd November 6 – 9 pm
Available as an NFT via Sedition Art from Friday 3rd. ‘Cathartic’ NFT 1/20 1:55
About the artist
mma Elliott is a British artist whose central themes look at the impermanence and fragility of the natural world – and the transitory nature of human existence. Working primarily across sculpture, painting and video, Elliott explores relationships between the refined and the primitive and the physical and the spiritual; examining the human condition from up close and from afar, honing in on minute anatomical and psychological details and broadly surveying the influences of our collective past on present behaviour, often in the same piece.
The destruction of habitats and ecosystems, our incongruities and hypocrocies and the back-and-forth between enlightened advancements in human evolution and devolution into animalistic behaviour, are all that’s played out in Elliott’s artworks. For her, art is a way of exploring that which is instinctive and that which is learnt.
With a classical training in painting and figurative sculpture both in the UK and Italy, Elliott’s work hangs in the balance between the classic and the contemporary, the devastating and the ridiculous. She believes art has a duty to wrestle with society and its elements of rigidity.
Elliott prioritises materials with longevity such as bronze and marble in her practice; using marble scavenged from skips or off cuts from large industrial projects to help minimise the ecological impact of working with such materials.
