In August, Sydney artist Emily Hunt will present a new series of plaster and ceramic dioramas at Chapter House Lane.
These works will extend upon the manically detailed and grotesque miniature world Hunt recently created in her March exhibition, ‘Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence’. The exhibition featured a giant kinetic train set that represented a speculative future – a utopian world where the artist takes control of the environment. Hunt’s new work for Chapter House Lane will refer back to the train, in a response to the injustices, the human brutality and blandness that she sees everywhere around her.
“The towers and mountains and follies of ‘Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence’ at first appear to be a fairytale island in a toxic palette of acid green and orange. Up close its violence is revealed. It’s a world equally beautiful and savage. A tiny bound figure is stranded atop a hill with no escape. Another holds a club, a pile of liver-red flesh at his feet. What at first seems an escape into fantasy includes scenes of horror which trigger an uncomfortable sense of familiarity. Scenes come to mind, not from a fictional world, but from the one we inhabit. These are the global, political realities of war, torture and persecution, as well as the smaller brutalities that underlie everyday existence.”
– Vanessa Berry, exhibition essay for ‘Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence’, March 2015
Emily Hunt works in printmaking (primarily etching), watercolour, collage and ceramics. Hunt is the recipient of a 2015 Marten Bequest Traveling Scholarship for painting, and was selected for Primavera 2014: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. She completed her Master of Fine Arts (Print Media) at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney in 2011. Also in 2011 she undertook an Erasmus Exchange Scholarship at Sint-Lucas Beeldende Kunst in Ghent, Belgium. In 2013, she undertook a mentorship at the Zentrum für Keramik in Berlin. Hunt is represented by The Commercial in Sydney. For more information see the artist’s website.
Opening: Thursday 6 August, 6–8pm