Pictures From My Heart
Pictures From My Heart features a selection of extraordinary drawings made by Emma
Talbot following the death of her husband, Paul. These drawings grew out of a desire
not only for emotional honesty but also for a simplification of her working process.
When poet and singer Patti Smith was asked if her recent memoir about her life with
Robert Mapplethorpe had laid to rest some ghosts, she replied, ‘I am not looking for
closure, that’s an illusion… just like pain… like when people say time heals all
wounds, it doesn’t! What time does is it helps to transfigure it, marshal it and
navigate it’.
These words mirror Talbot’s own process of navigation. ‘I was deciding what I
essentially needed to make work. I started with just a few watercolours and paper
and just began to draw everything that was in my mind. I no longer cared what anyone
thought.’ The result is a searingly honest series of what Talbot terms
‘psychological stories’. There is a lot of telling here and not all of it doleful.
There are images of life and love, of coming home drunk and feeling bad, snippets of
Pablo Neruda poetry and quotes from The Smiths all rendered in an elegant European
script and remembrances of times past sitting in front of grandma’s fire as a little
girl. In these diaristic drawings time is compacted - the now and then flow in a
nonlinear stream, all executed through Talbot’s masterful knowing of her own
aesthetic.
These drawings did not spring from some presumed year zero of the artist’s practice,
There are nuances here and creative decisions, which Talbot has honed over the years
through her paintings. Yet there is also a new fearlessness, the sense that we are
looking at the work of an artist at an important pinnacle of her career – the point
where the artist has become so embedded with the work – that life and art are no
longer separate and in Talbot’s sophisticated and sure hand a truly unique new
language emerges.
Talbot lives and works in London. Her previous Transition exhibitions include The
Craft, 2007 with Cathie Pilkington and I’ll be Your Mirror, 2005 (publication
available). Recent exhibitions include Party! at New Art Gallery Walsall, Storytime
with Dexter Dalwood at Gallery North, Newcastle, One should not be thwarted by
antidisestablishmentarianism, Primo Alonso, London and The Jerwood Drawing Prize
2009.
Private View Fri 23 April 6-9pm
Transition Gallery
Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, London E8 4QN
Gallery open: Fri-Sun 12-6pm
free admission