Emma Smith, First light, 2022, Oil on canvas, 300x 250mm
In A.D 1552, on May the 17th such a terrible storm with hail descended on Dordrecht in Holland, that the people thought the Day of Judgement was coming. And it lasted half an hour. Several of the stones weighed up to a few pounds and 8 lot. And where they fell, they gave a frightful stench.[1]
I’m fascinated by the way paintings, from another time, place, ethos and social fabric can reveal profound insights to us about the experience of living now. I wonder what the paintings we make today will reveal to those who get to see them (should anyone get to) in the future. I like to try to imagine how our work about a myriad of things contemporaneous to us, might be interpreted quite strangely, an unknown reportage for a place we have no understanding of.
Forms are loosened from their immediate meaning in this context. They are suspended in a moment between two states, the transition is durational, but the entities are implacably still. They float in a liquid acuity where assumed laws of appearance have no binding; that which invites close scrutiny, unnervingly crisp and to the point, exists alongside vast, distant indistinct, ruinous forms. They hiss and split, caught as they are, in a chain reaction that no longer has a beginning or an end.
[1]Image: Fo. 171 The (Augsburg) Book of Miracles, 16th Century Illuminated manuscript.
Facsimile published by Taschen, Joshua P. Waterman, Till-Holger Borchert, 2017.
Emma Smith 