Emily Motto
b. 1992, Orpington
2011–2014 BFA Fine Art, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford
Artist’s Statement
I make playful sculptures that perform and evolve throughout, and beyond, my creation – especially in terms of their shape, and the physicality of the unstable materials that I build them from.
When creating parasites I was inspired by how the materials I made and used fed off each other’s properties; the net, dough and string of my recent sculpture series structurally supporting each other, with these responses creating new, and often quite fragile forms.
My work usually begins by fiddling with materials - handmade, domestic, and convenient - and playing with their properties to explore what forms can be created. This element of play is echoed in the curation of my sculptures within environments that you can explore around and inside.
Working with recipes of dough, I have been excited by how my sculptures change and adapt; playdough crystallizing in reaction with the surrounding environment, yeast reactions expanding bread dough into novel forms, and weight distorting underlying structures. I enjoy delegating these elements of the making process to the properties of the materials I make and choose.
These sculptural forms behave like figures; sensual, tactile, fragile, unstable and transient.
In my most recent experiments in Moira’s Lounge I have been creating digital-like moiré patterns using the analogue sensual materials I work with. I have been excited to explore the physicality of figurative forms in relation to their flat representation in virtual digital images, such as using printed images of people posted on Facebookamongst the environments of other structures I build,- to compete as figurative objects.
Recent Exhibitions
Solo:
2014 Airheads, The Mezzanine, Oxford
2013 Parasites, The Dolphin Gallery, Oxford
Group:
2013 Portraits of Dadapresidents and Oberdadas, Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich
2013 OVADA Open, OVADA Warehouse, Oxford
2013 SOLDES, 44-45 High Street, Oxford
2012 FREE CAKE, Dilston Grove, CGP Gallery, London
Awards and Residencies
2014 Clyde & Co Blank Canvas Commissioning Art Prize, London
2013 The Ashmolean Design Award, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
2012 The Geoffrey Rhoades Commemorative Bursary, University of Oxford
2012 Michel Scholarship, The Queen’s College, University of Oxford
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