Emma Talbot @ Dundee Contemporary Arts
Emma Talbot’s Ghost Calls at the Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre is her first exhibition on Scottish soil and is a perfect, appositional choice for the DCA’s first exhibition of the year. Whilst the core concept behind this exhibition - the depiction of a world post-cataclysm - germinated before the Covid-19 pandemic, the actual physical work was created during it, an eerie and tangible interpretation of art imitating life.
Large painted silk canvases suspend from the ceiling, adorned in lush earthly colours; varied shades of teal, purple, burnt umber, - with feminine bodies, mythological bird-like creatures and text intertwined, almost like a folklorish comic book.
Audio permeates the room, sounds of harmonic wailing echoing from seemingly-unknown sources. I later learned from the exhibition notes that these sounds stemmed from Talbot’s interest in ‘keeners’: Celtic women who participated in a vocal ritual of performative mourning. The practice exists in different iterations across all cultures, but it is typically women who perform these roles as witnesses to grief and death.
Emma Talbot, Ghost Calls, 2021. Installation view at Dundee Contemporary Arts
The sound truly is haunting, rich vowel sounds that wail in lament in a vocal demonstration of the sensorium of grief: open throat, wet eyes and wringing hands. A section of the silk tapestry reads ‘harmonising with ancient symphonies astral & earthly’, words that confirm the sound.
Decorating the perimeter of the gallery are painted drawings on paper and resting on various podiums are sculptural works of stitched, painted fabrics and papier-mâché. In the exhibition notes Talbot speaks of what she calls the ‘slippage’ of painting: the medium’s ability to act as, well, a medium - a bridge between this world and the metaphysical one.
Emma Talbot, Ghost Calls, 2021. Installation view at Dundee Contemporary Arts
The fluidity of the form possesses an ability to transport the viewer into a dream-like state. The ethereal figures situated in their colourful silken canvases proclaim many ideas. But who are these ghosts who call? Talbot describes them as ‘visionaries who witness everything in the world from all time.’
Even aside from our current deadly virus, the end of the world is never difficult to imagine. In recent cultural consciousness, it is environmental decline that results in our demise - and in Talbot’s work, this is tangible: ‘What Grows in this Environment? Do You Reach for something else?’
One small work is titled ‘A Crash in Fast and Slow Motion’, and in the exhibition interview with curator Dara O’Brien, Talbot talks at length about ‘our centuries love of the speed of technology’ and how this love separates us from the holistic ways of craft and wellbeing that are integral to our survival.
There is a call for the communal within these works, a necessary reminder after our year of lockdown solitude. One sculpture shows a woman bent over her dog - an image of companionship and tenderness, her long hair flowing from her bent neck.
The omnipresent feminine voice that echoes around these canvasses recalls to me the works of ecofeminist scholar Val Plumwood who writes that women and the earth share a interconnected relationship due to both being perceived by Western patriarchy as unruly, wild and in need of control.
With the work being created during the pandemic, the discourse around the value of the arts to society was heavily discussed. The thought directives that Talbot issues throughout her paintings demonstrates the value of art for introspection about pertinent social and cultural issues and its ability to hold a mirror to our world.
Emma Talbot, Ghost Calls, 2021. Installation view at Dundee Contemporary Arts
Though as the artist said herself, ‘the tenor of the work is closer to a poem than to an instruction’, one section of the large silk canvas reads:
‘Let poets speak, listen in to voices you never heard before.’
The exhibition is deliciously vague, deep and dark: truly a witnessing of a dream - the sort of dream that follows you around and implores you to decode it’s mystery.
The exhibition runs until the 8th August.
Words by Cheryl McGregor