Bad Objects, Little Deaths

About

Up close and personal, and close to home, Emma Talbot's new work is a negotiation of the physical in relation to her raw and emotional drawings. Her 3D pieces, ‘things as opposed to nothings' are direct and honest manifestations of her internalised thoughts. A thinking process informed by the psychoanalytical writings of Melanie Klein, particularly her propositions about good and bad 'internal objects' - the complex cycles of projection and introjection between the world of internalised figures and objects (based on emotions, frustrations, needs and wants) and the outside real world. Talbot takes the idea that bad objects grow inside if we are not loved as the literal leitmotif to externalise her private world. Things that can hardly be articulated are fashioned from the this-and-that stuff of the domestic everyday, old leggings, navy velour, wool, hair and thread. Three shapes, like malevolent modern day mojos, suggest bad heads piled on top of each other. Accompanying these Talbot also introduces us to her Little Deaths* a bed sheet sized group of black and white drawings on thin Japanese paper which expose the narratives of her sexual fantasies. Echoing the domestic theme her painting Times are Changing is formally based on the idea of a quilt, standing in here not as some quaint coverlet but more as an un-covering of images of contemporary life, conveying a sense of unease where protest and the homemade become unlikely bed fellows. · Taken from petit mort the French term for orgasm.