Thin air, oil on linen, 25x20cm, Pouquoi London, 4 Princelet Street London, 2024
Emma Tod studied Painting at Falmouth School of Art before gaining her MFA in Fine Art Media at the Slade. She was selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries and has been a member of a number of artists run organisations including Gasworks, Lux Critical Forum and The Lost Soul And Stranger Service Station. She has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad including the ICA and the Royal Academy and has attended residencies in Budapest and Cape Town. Emma is a Lecturer in Fine Art and Contextual Practice at Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London. Recently she has been shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize and the Contemporary British Painting Prize where she received the Blyth Arts Award.
Tod’s work explores the remediation of paint in a period of digital image circulation, with its accelerating speeds of transmission and shared attention deficit. Works negotiate this shift through stillness and ambiguity. Peripheral events, fleeting moments, and chance encounters are brought to the centre creating new imaginary territories. Visual fragments taken from the internet, TV, and art history are playfully recombined and erased. Zones of exclusion are brought to the fore, challenging the primacy of
centre over periphery. Exclusion matters.
Layers of transparent glaze are built to create a shallow depth of field that replicates the luminosity of the screen. Here, figurative and non-figurative elements meet, collide, and are altered by each other. Fluctuating areas of colour and bodies of paint are expanded and foregrounded. Ambiguity invites us to speculate, to create meaning playfully, offering a counterpoint to the directed and surveilled nature of our digital lives.
Night walks are an important part of Tod’s practice. Not only challenging what can be seen, but who should be seen, where, for what reason?. Walking at night can be away of disappearing, and of simultaneously becoming hyper-visible. Night walking can be to challenge to paternalist orthodoxy. So too can painting.
Essay by Cherry Smyth:
‘How in the Ruins of Our Dreams’,
Cherry Smyth
‘Ourself behind ourself, concealed –
Should startle most –
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror’s least.’
Emily Dickinson (1)
In On Freedom, Maggie Nelson examines what freedom can possibly mean in relation to the terrifying loss of futurity that irreversible global warning has delivered. Invoking Donna Haraway’s dilemma of whether to ‘succumb to despair or to hope’, Nelson argues that we can occupy a middle, less binary place, to attempt to negotiate the new and unforeseen material and psychological constraints on our lives.
The profound and subtle paintings by Emma Tod appear to navigate living and thinking on a precarious brink, both the consciousness of mortality itself, as well as imagining the earth before humans, and after us. There’s a tender eeriness to their indeterminate presence, as they hover in a half-light of burnt umber and worn moss green, with blurred forms emerging or receding from view. In one painting, what looks a hollow bone of murky pink is suspended in a field of quiet orange. A shape that could be a wilted pansy spreads like an afterbirth towards the bottom of the canvas. There is a quiet hum. Is it dusk, or post-dusk – this is the light we are left with. It seems as though the light is failing to rise or fall. Tender. How do I know this? Am I seduced? The smear of presences occur in a kind of layered light event that keeps clarity just out of reach, a happening we cannot yet make sense of. There’s the sense of a chronology that has or will have or had consequences, but can we read it? The tenses do not hold firm when looking at Tod’s work. Perhaps this floating time scale is another side effect of not being able to fully believe in descendancy. For many cultures in the global south, this is the norm, but it is a deeply destabilising, fresh awareness in the West. We carry on as if it isn’t too late. We know no other way to be in time. What is this image asking of us? To slow down, to let change happen – to allow decomposition and restoration – the way mould puffs into dust, then nothing, when you touch it.
In another canvas, there is the green murmur of lush, underwater summer light, slipping into hazier silt-light, with a fringe of golden dapple making a ladder for the eye out of the top of the image. Here you begin to gather how Tod layers the colour through optical colour mixing, using transparent glazes one over the other, so that you can see through as well as look at the hues. As the green seeps into rust, you pick up the aura of the painting – an aura of moving through water as we move through time, hearing movement, the synaesthetic sound of enclosing green. How do you know it’s water you are in? We know the feel of entering and leaving it – the splash and ripple, or the peeling off out of it, but being inside water is hard to describe. It has an amniotic, pre-verbal feel to it. Is death like this? Tod is working towards finding a haptic form for the cognitive dissonance of living in a ‘planetary hospice’, as Nelson terms it, through pushing the materiality of the image until you can barely read it, but are familiar with its substance, weight and volume. By constantly erasing and building the image, Tod wants to recall the earth, and the ground of landscape painting itself, and then revoke it, showing how climate catastrophe has irrevocably altered both.
A mad orange fireball throttles towards us out of the green shade of another painting. It spins its ragged edges out of the smoothed surface with the sticky impasto blast of rage or panic traversing a still mind. But stay looking longer and it pulls you into its dark red core, like a split gem that invites you to gaze into the earth’s crust. As Sean Borodale puts it so forbiddingly:
‘Geology is dreaming in the
earth mined up./I feel the shapes of it/ in the voice struggling in
angles and distance./I feel the voice in unsurfaced volumes./The
colours do not dare to shine/but are broken into/ so they bleed red
light cut from the molten./ The north melts.’ (2)
We are reaching the future more quickly than we imagined. It is not the magic wonder we foresaw, of ease, comfort, faster and cleaner travel, a world of post-sickness and harmonious tolerance and justice. Something interferes with our dreams like a crusty edge of sickly orange advancing into a blameless yellow expanse.
Tod talks of her process as akin to photographic development: she waits for an image to occur, to make nothing something, while still letting its nothingness stand. You look into a steamed up mirror and see an approximate self – what gives it shadow and meaning? What is the action behind the action? We notice a glimmer being lost in fog. A grey apology. An apology for what? Being. Being provisional. Can we remove our traces starting with what we have seen? She explains that she makes ‘little changes through marks’ and ‘wonders can I change one bit of it without changing the whole? No. It keeps rebounding through all these different dimensions. Uncertainty is the key.’
Tod’s paintings hinge on just-aboutness: just-about legible shapes; just-about states of mind that swing between the supremacy humanism granted, with its hierarchy over plants, animals and minerals, and the implacable consciousness of what that has wrought. Some paintings suggest evidence, a residue of something that bothers us coming to light, but is not quite there yet, the way beads of grit accrue in an oyster or sunlight soils the hems of a blank page in a closed book. Sometimes a marine intelligence seems to feel its way through a blue-green underworld, overworld. Are we deep down or far out? Its pale feelers are palpable. In others, we are in and yet outside the sky as if looking from a plane at a great distance that is beyond us, through technology or fear, and we chase the air.
- Dickinson, Emily, from ‘One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted’, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Faber: London, 1970, p.333
- Borrodale, Sean, from ‘Air as a Mineral Disturbed’, in Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency, ed. Kate Simpson, Valley Press, 2021
Selected exhibitions:
Forthcoming:
Silent Disco, curated by Grahame Crowley, 2024
IMT Gallery, London, 2024
Closer, Blyth Gallery, Imperial College London, June 2025
2024
Great Expectations, General Assembly, London
All This Wrath Blue Shop, Gallery, London
London Art Fair with GBS Fine Art
2023
"Frequency" curated by Imogen Wetherell for OHSH Projects
www.ohshprojects.com/frequency
John Moores Painting Prize 2023 Walker Art Gallery
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/jmpp/john-moores-painting-prize
Contemporary British Painting Prize 2023
Huddersfield Art Gallery and Thames Side Studios, London
Solo show IMT Gallery London
Light the lamp rarely, let the shadow come
imagemusictext.com/
2022
Beep Painting Biennial, Elysium Gallery, Swansea
Books curated by Cultivate, London
https://cultivategallery.com/
2021
Vertical Merger Curated by Uncovered Collective, London
This year's Model Studio 1.1 London
Saturation curated by Cultivate, London.
https://cultivategallery.com/
Post Analogue Labyrinth IV, virtual exhibition
2019
P.A.L Deptford X, London
2018
Osman’s Xmas Bazaar, Studio1.1, London
Post Analogue Labyrinth, Deptford X, London
2017
The Lost Soul and Stranger Service Station, Deptford X, London
Deep Space studio1.1, London
2016
Civivlsed? Hoxton 402, London
Looking up, studio 1.1, 2016
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London
On Landscape #3, Lower Hewood Farm, Dorset
Float, Southampton Solent University
2015
I’MTEN, IMT Gallery, London September
backs to the future, Lux Critical Forum 2014/15 @ Five Years, London
Red Show, Studio 1.1, London
On Landscape, Yinka Shonibare Guest Projects, London
2013
Playback, Peacock Yard, London, July
2012
Ideas In Motion, Milton Gallery, St Paul’s School, London
2011
Bloomberg New Contemporary Archive Films, ICA, London
Chainletter, www.chainletter.mini-haha.com, 2011
2010
I Want To Believe, Millais Gallery, Southampton
2008
Life Is A Gas, Beverley Knowles, London
2004
International Exchange, Times Square Gallery, Hunter College, New York
Tempered Ground, Museum Of Garden History / Danielle Arnaud, London
Weeds, Hiscox Arts Projects, London
The Moon Will Save Our Ass, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
2003
One take,Film Festival Zagreb, Croatia
New Contemporaries, Cornerhouse Manchester and 14 Wharf Road, London
Island Film and Video Festival, Prenelle Gallery, London
2001
East of Eden, Spacex Gallery, Exeter
Millennium Minutes, Touring Show, Great Britain
1999
Porthcurno Beach Super 8 film Camera work for Tacita Dean, Newlyn Gallery Penzance
Close To Home. UFF Gallery, Budapest