Artist Emma Talbot: Drawing the Inner World

My deep fascination or love of drawing comes from I think very early childhood. Just the simplicity of being able to make things up for yourself, make marks and then just build a kind of set of ideas that you can watch happen almost. That for me was a real pleasure as a kid and also I think it's a bit like a kind of avoidance that if you can go into a space that's endlessly interesting, you can make it interesting, then you take yourself away from things as well and you know when you're a kid and you're playing in your world, it's like you never want to finish doing that. That's what drawing was always like for me. It's a really complicated question whether it's a world that you have access to or whether it's something within you because it could be that in some way we all share consciousness. So in that respect you are tuning into something that we could all tune into. But the important thing about drawing as a child is that you're not usually looking at something else to make the drawing and in that sense it comes from you and you're not usually too worried about how realistic it looks or whether it's in proportion or any of those things that you learn as you get older. And that kind of directness is the thing that for me has a lot of energy and that's why it's important. It has a lot of movement and therefore it can carry ideas really well for me. I think we could try it just slightly blue just to see. You know I said to you that I think it's like a cerulean or something but it's on the image some bits of it are a bit blue. Exactly. And it'd be good to see what it's like. Yeah just a touch of blue and a little bit darker. Yeah. It's interesting that you know this way of thinking about drawing which is really internal. It's like you you're making something up for yourself. But that operates as a child and then I left that kind of drawing behind for a very long time. And then at a certain point in my life when I became a widow I was grieving. I felt that the things I was making were too far outside of me and they didn't correspond to my feelings. So then I picked up drawing again as a way of being very close to my interior thoughts and allowing things to come out that maybe were unexpected to me. But then as that practice of drawing developed and I wouldn't know what I was going to draw. As it developed I realized that it also incorporated concerns I had about the world around me. You know I by then I was an adult and so I was thinking I wasn't thinking like a child. I was thinking about all the things I'm concerned about that are things we share because we're all living in the same period of time. And so it seemed to me that drawing could make a bridge between the very interior, the very felt experience and the sort of common sensibilities of our era. It could bridge those things together which is something that we're all doing anyway all the time. But drawing became a sort of visual representation of that to me. I think it's for me the role of drawing is to occupy an unexpected space. It isn't a given. There isn't a rule about what it should look like. So in the work there can be motifs. Say a snake is a motif I use a lot and either it's something that has a particular meaning in the drawing or it's a chaotic thing. You know it's something that disrupts the space visually. So it can operate on different levels or I might reference say Chiron at the moment. I'm thinking about this figure Chiron the wounded healer and I love the idea of the wounded healer as a present figure, a contemporary figure who's a sort of poetic figure but someone who represents our wish to heal ourselves and that this wounded healer influences us in some way to make us think about how we could reconstruct our social or political systems or the kinds of systems that we're living within. How we could rethink those so that we start to create a sort of future which is probably a kinder future but a future which is more caring let's say and that seems a really important part of how we read our current situation to me. So Chiron in an image might seem like a reference to a Greek myth that seems ungrounded in contemporary times but for me these mythic figures they're lasting because they can meet every single time in which they appear and they have a way of telling our stories, our contemporary stories. So I would use a figure like that but only if it had meaning to me. If I didn't believe in the narrative of it I'd never use it. I think it would be empty. Using a process like lithography means that you have to apply yourself to a very particular process and that has quite distinct rules if you like that tell you you could operate like this, you should consider these things, that they're not the kinds of things you're always considering when you're drawing on your own and you're also working with other people so you have to be able to articulate something about what you're making while you're making it which usually you don't, I don't, I just make what I'm making. But the technique of lithography is something that you have to be able to understand in order to plan the image but at the same time you don't want the image to become inhibited by the fact that you're planning it so you have to keep a balance all the time which is remembering how you do things and at the same time taking into account yeah I need to think about which layer will come after which layer or which part of the image I'm making now and also you're painting always with black even if the print is going to be yellow you're always painting something black so you have to in a way I described it earlier like photoshop in your mind you have to imagine how this will be and your it's it's like your mind is well trained to do that as an artist but you have to kind of apply it very precisely here. I think drawing is a space which is quite different than a very direct mode of say speaking or you know there are there are texts in my works in my drawings so there is some direct language but the way text might operate or the way image operates is as if it gives space to things that haven't yet been articulated or maybe they haven't been articulated for me and sometimes I could make a drawing and not really know what it's about but that space that kind of license to open out thinking so that it doesn't always have to encompass things very very directly is what's really beautiful about drawing is that you're you're thinking of an idea or an idea is appearing to you but you're also thinking about the materiality of how you're making that how you're building that image and those things are really working in combination they're not they're not separate so they're in that sense it's not illustration it's very a very open space and that feels to me like a space which is really about your own that's where your own voice is and that's why it's always the sort of cornerstone for me in my work I think.