Max Mara Art Prize for Women
Emma Talbot
The Age / L’Età
30 June – 4 September 2022
Whitechapel Gallery
On entering this show, I was met with a sense of atmosphere. It had the reverence that a site of significance might have, church-like in a way, but it felt earthy, like I was getting closer to the earth; maybe I was underground. Low lit with lights that punctuated works like soft halos, vast textile pieces hung, dangling from the ceiling to the floor, spanning the length of the room, wafted in the slight backdraught of people.
Emma Talbot, The Age/L’Età, Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Installation view
Emma Talbot, The Age/L’Età, Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Installation view
This room and all its works felt very conscious, like a conscious stream of thoughts. Each was a different dimension of the same thing – drawings, animation, large-scale silks, sculpture – as they drip-fed words questioning and pulling on a narrative that ran throughout: of current issues in our worrying world, questioning authority and power, climate change, sustainability, consumerism, feminism, care.
All the works had roots in mark making, a relationship to drawing and the feeling of the hand or handmade, and they were ruminating on the fact that we seem to do the opposite; we have ‘eyes that see but do not feel’ as inscribed on one of her works. Within the environment Talbot has created – and it is an environment, like a landscape - she covers complex issues, all interwoven, and time is needed to be in this space, to let them seep in.
Emma Talbot, The Age/L’Età, Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Installation view
The work that really caught my attention (I have to say, I have never stood so long to watch a piece of digital art) was an animation based on The Twelve Labours of Hercules. A story which was ‘based on initiation rites for young men [and is] a perfect example of stories of power and how power is exercised by the
Emma Talbot, The Age/L’Età, Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Installation view
patriarchy’ (Art Forum, 2022) but here, Talbot reconsiders an elderly woman in place of Hercules’ and how she navigates problems. The elderly woman is a key figure throughout Talbot’s practice. ‘The female figures that swim, run or fly through Talbot’s landscapes of imagination are featureless…an avatar for the artist herself. Yet the blankness…also suggests this figure as Everywoman’ (Talbot, E: 8)
The animation took you on a journey, storytelling its way through landscapes with movements that were not smooth, along endlessly concentric lines, rippling and delineating, woven and webbed. While I do not work with any shared themes with Talbot, I was fascinated by this animation and considered it in relation to my stop-motion drawings. I feel like this work was a critical measuring stick against which to measure my animations and the direction they should be pushed to make them work harder. Its presentation was nothing special; it was just shown on a simple television screen. But maybe that is what it needed. I am not comparing them in a literal sense; Talbot’s does a very different thing, it handles a different subject matter, it is storytelling, and it’s a different format of animation – but in the sense of recognising the rigour and calibre of this animation. These would be skills to aim for.
Emma Talbot, The Age/L’Età, Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Installation view
Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Emma Talbot The Age / L’Età (2022) [Exhibition] Whitechapel Gallery, London, 30 June – 4 September 2022
Talbot, E. 2022. Emma Talbot: The Age/ L'Età. Whitechapel Gallery
Whitechapel Gallery, 2022. Emma Talbot: The Age/ L'Età. (online) https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/emma-talbot/ (accessed 18/10/2022)
Art Review, 2022. 8th Max Mara Art Prize for Women: Emma Talbot (online) https://artreview.com/8th-max-mara-art-prize-for-women-emma-talbot/ (accessed 18/10/2022)
Art Forum, 2022. Emma Talbot: A feminist take on the Twelve Labours of Hercules (online) https://www.artforum.com/interviews/a-feminist-take-on-the-twelve-labors-of-hercules-88823 (accessed 18/10/2022)