Emma Talbot: Magical Thinking

Victoria Miro Projects is delighted to launch Magical Thinking, an online exhibition of new paintings by Emma Talbot. This is the fourth in an ongoing series of presentations by invited international artists on Vortic. The show also features a new soundtrack composed by the artist activated by navigating the exhibition.

Emma Talbot is acclaimed for work that confronts some of the most urgent questions of our time: about how we relate to one another and to the world around us on personal, ecological and technological levels, often proposing future possibilities while considering the role of art as one of the most ancient forms of communication. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture and animation, and moving freely between aspects of autobiography, memory, psychology, feminist theory and ecopolitics, the artist creates fluidly rendered worlds combining image, pattern and, often, text that extend a highly personal engagement into the realm of allegory. Her works often take the form of large-scale paintings on free-hanging silks, as seen recently as part of the exhibition The Milk of Dreams, at the Venice Biennale, in 2022.

Painted on silk, a material that combines sensuousness with immense durability (it is in fact the strongest natural textile in the world), the works in this presentation are united by the theme of Magical Thinking, an idea which the artist describes as ‘encapsulating the ways in which humans have used the imaginary to understand and to describe their place in the world... It has been present in human culture since the earliest times, for example as the foundation of myths, symbols and culture.’ Such thinking surrounds questions and occurrences that, historically in the absence of scientific understanding or a direct causal link, might have been explained through stories linked to divinity or spirit; the natural becoming supernatural.

Paintings on view include those alluding to the bond between a mother and child. As the artist says, ‘the fictional protective world or galaxy of two that a mother imagines for a newborn, their bond a safe womb-space that floats in a chaotic, tempestuous universe.’ Other work refers to the myth of Persephone, who was captured and forced to live with the dead in the Underworld for half the year, returning to earth each spring. Persephone’s story accounted for the regeneration of plants after a winter in which they seemed to have died. It is, the artist says, ‘a human way of exploring this phenomenon, giving humans a kind of agency in the world around them. In my work, these paintings also reflect on ancestors and the chain of life, or the energy that one brings to life.’ In another painting, a woman flies on a moth – an idea of journeying into the unconscious, a kind of night journey guided by the light of the moon – while a further work depicts a woman meeting a wolf, an alliance with something that could either protect or harm, and one, therefore, that is a test of trust.

About this new body of work the artist comments, ‘I like the creative extensions of using the imaginary to explain the unknown, or to transmit common understandings. This way of thinking weaves together the limits of factual scientific knowledge with the unconscious in powerful ways. As a title for a body of works, it allowed me to think into diverse ideas. All the imaginary episodes in the work reflect on our contemporary times – the volatile world in which we try to survive, on politics, ecology and what it is to be human.’