Emma Fenelon
Emma works with strong stoneware clays that can withstand the rigours of time and weather. She rolls the clay into slabs, then textures them using a growing collection of vintage tools and found objects, rococo door furniture, pizza box plastic inserts, old lace doilies, seasonal plants, each leaving a distinct imprint, a trace of something gathered or hinting at a past use.
Once the slabs have firmed, she begins to assemble them like a patchwork quilt, building from the ground up. The surfaces evoke layers of time and memory, becoming a kind of palimpsest, part tale, part mystery. Her process is an exploration of how place holds memory, how lived experience and myth leave their marks, how we inherit from the past. The individual forms often come from dreams or deep-held images: a boat embedded in a building, a sunlit stairwell, a bath in the forest.
Emma builds intuitively, without a fixed plan, following a path slowly towards the top. Towers emerge slowly from corridors and joined slabs, with boats and pathways weaving through them. Some paths are safe, others more uncertain. She adds places of pause,spaces of arrival and rest,as part of an ongoing journey.
Her tower sculptures are both architectural and metaphorical: they speak to how we are formed and how we form, how we build upon what came before to shape new stories. They reflect a belief that we are made from the layers we travel through, the structures we inherit, and the stories we go on adding to.
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