Exhibition text written by residency host Gina Wall for public show Walk The Flesh Transparent in November 2023
Emma is a performance artist and choreographer whose work at Altyre explored the idea of coming out; both into wilderness and into queerness. During her time on the residency, Emma made a costume that doubled as a den. The tarpaulin is a covering, a surface, a topology, stitched over with high visibility materials and fluorescent thread. The use of these materials, which she describes as ‘urban flotsam’ gestures to the world of work, and the stitched contours speak to cartography and movement scores. These found materials coalesce to make a hide, which doesn’t hide. Using the malleable form of the tarpaulin, Emma performs a somatic relation to landscape that is conspicuous and camouflaged, explicit and coded; a relation that calls its queer identity from inside nature, a choreographic repertoire responsive to the elements, to landscape; sexuality making place.
The show included my photographs, texts, the film and the tarp as an interactive element. Photos by Joshua Di Mattina-Beven
