Artist Talk: Emily Speed
Introduced by Mel French
Friday 18 Nov 2022
10am - 11.30am
Pálás Cinema
TULCA’s Artist Talks Series in partnership with ATU CCAM presents the final talk of this year’s edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts by UK based artist Emily Speed. This year’s talks series is kindly hosted by Pálás Cinema.
Artist: Emily Speed
Known for her work examining the relationship between the body and architecture, Speed’s practice considers how a person is shaped by the buildings they have occupied and how a person occupies their own psychological space. Working in sculpture, performance and film, Speed's work looks at the relationship between people and buildings and in particular the power dynamics at play in built space. Her work plays with scale and creates layers around the body, often hybrid forms of clothing and architecture.
Over the last few years, Speed has had solo presentations at Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives, TRUCK, Calgary, and Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Texas. She has been commissioned to make performances for Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Laumeier Sculpture Park (St Louis) and Edinburgh Art Festival among others and recent exhibitions include: A Woman’s Place at Knole House; Body Builders at Exeter Phoenix Gallery; and The Happenstance, Scotland + Venice at the Architecture Biennale in 2018. Emily Speed lives and works in Cheshire, UK.
Flatland is centred around a film installation, which uses set design, choreography and costume to depict flattened hierarchies within a close-knit community of women. This is accompanied by a second film that focuses on a single performer, signing a text written by author Eley Williams in British Sign Language.
The work is inspired by Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella, Flatland, a satire of Victorian society where all existence is limited to two dimensions. In this society men may have any number of sides depending on their status. Women, on the other hand, are thin, straight lines who are at the bottom of the hierarchy. As their pointed ends are considered to be dangerous, they are restricted to separate entrances and must paint one end of their line-body orange as well as swaying continuously to alert others to their presence.
Echoing Abbott’s novella, the performers in Speed’s film begin line-like and rigid before working together and unfolding to create more colourful, layered and complex shapes through increasingly vibrant movement. This evolution is also realised through costume. The performers wear functional housework garments, such as aprons and tabards that contain hidden elements relating to the set design.
Venue: Pálás Cinema, 15 Lower Merchant's Road, Galway
Accessibility: venue is wheelchair accessible
Parking: pay and display
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The World Was All Before Them
Curated by Clare Gormley
4 - 20 November 2022
Galway, Ireland