16-06-2011
From 16 July YSP presents MAKE SHIFT, the first solo exhibition by Liverpool-based artist Emily Speed. Emily’s work explores the temporary and the transient through reference to architecture and the body, producing sculpture, installations and drawings. Her use of found, often throwaway materials like cardboard and tape reflects the essence of her work and her consideration of precariousness, delicacy, implied degeneration and isolation in the most basic and pared back forms of architectural shelter. YSP’s eclectic built environment, from the historic through to the contemporary, has been a source of fascination to the artist during her preparation for this exhibition, informing and inspiring new works on display in the Bothy Gallery.
Emily examines buildings literally and metaphorically – as physical shelters and as containers for memory, bound with the human history of their occupiers. The inevitability of decay plays an important role, with the structures she makes often seeming to exist in an in-between state appearing either half-built or half-derelict.
In recent pieces Emily has introduced the body directly to her work, through sculptures that can be worn or inhabited. The old Bretton Hall student accommodation buildings at YSP – which now lie empty and destined for demolition – have become the site for a new work. Keen to employ the abandoned items of furniture that were a temporary part of the lives of generations of students, Emily built new hiding spaces made out of drawers and mattresses, giving a fleeting new life to the vacated spaces. The associated photographs will be displayed along with a new installation made within the gallery using the same furniture and which visitors can enter.
Emily has also built a coracle and added an architectural structure to create a floating shelter, which she sailed on the lake at YSP. A series of photographs capturing this will be displayed alongside the coracle . A new work egg-nest-home-country-universe, comprising plaster eggs which support tiny fragments of buildings, addresses the delicate balance between existence and disintegration. Whilst eggs are a microcosm of the universe and define notions of home, protection and shelter, they are also inherently fragile and only reveal their contents once fractured and broken.
Study Day:
06.08.11 / 11.00–16.00 / £4
Book online
An informal day of discussion looking at the spaces we inhabit, with artist Emily Speed and YSP deputy curator Sarah Coulson. Includes a walking tour round parts of the estate that have influenced the new work made for Emily’s Bothy Gallery exhibition. A selection of short texts will be circulated prior to the event.
The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication, featuring texts by Gordon Brennan, Laura Mousavi, Emily Speed and Sarah Coulson, priced £5. A limited edition cast plaster egg work is also available, priced £120.
Emily has kept a record of the exhibition’s development, collecting related texts, ideas, thoughts and images in a blog: www.emilyspeed.tumblr.com
Emily Speed is an emerging artist with a growing reputation: in 2010 she was shortlisted for the Liverpool Art Prize, and was selected to undertake residencies at A Foundation, Liverpool and Project Space Leeds. In 2009 she took part in a European Capital of Culture exchange, making work in Linz, Austria. Her practice encompasses sculpture, installations, drawings and artist’s books.
Supported by Design Centre North.
www.emilyspeed.co.uk