Making Chaos Between Forms

The line marking lucidity from darkness is yet to be marked out.

Adrienne Rich, From an Old House in America (1974)

I propose to make a body of work in the form of a series of zines that explore unstable oppositions through a convergence of imagery and text. These include, among others, the familiar and unfamiliar, intimacy and distance, red and blue, photography and painting, gaining and losing, remembering and forgetting. The zines will not follow a linear narrative; rather, snippets of personal writing, theory and imagery will move in and out of one another in a flow that may initially seem tangential but gradually builds a rounded perspective on these subjects and the ways in which they interrelate.

Over the course of this year, I have written about the uncanny, domesticity, objecthood, suburbia and my experience of my mother’s epilepsy. The personal as political is central to my practice, and I am open to sharing intimate material in order to create an enigmatic connection with the reader. At the same time, this must be mediated by the distance that naturally occurs between my own experience and the reader’s subjectivity: the gap.

The imagery will combine my own photography, drawing and text, while the visual appearance of the work will remain lo-fi and inexpensive to produce and reproduce. I will primarily use photocopiers at my local library and stationery shop, the latter being accustomed to my arriving with odd material. I hope to distribute the zines anywhere I can: fugitive flyer holders in museums and shops, independent fairs and bookshops that accept DIY small press material. I want the reader to hold something fragile, susceptible to damage, reproduction and loss.

What I have always found beneficial about writing in relation to memory is that, once written down, a memory is no longer fully inhabited. In being translated into language, it is essentially given away, taking on another form through letters and words. This also occurs within my painting and photography practice: one form may prompt another, carrying memory, feeling and direct observation across media into altered forms that shift their original significance.

My interest in these subject tensions stems from personal research into philosophical ideas regarding individuation and becoming. A woman asked me the other day, ‘what did you do BBK?’ I said, ‘What does BBK mean?’ She said: ‘Before Birthing Kids.’ Since my youngest of three has started school, and indeed beforehand, I have reflected deeply on societal expectations on women and mothers, and my expectation of my own mother. What a tightrope of failure we thread. What happens to curiosity and desire beyond these roles and responsibilities? The either/or of motherhood and freedom.

I have started researching Heidegger’s Being and Time through lectures and online articles. I have not yet embarked on the volume itself, though potentially its ideas will gradually filter into the zines in tenuous and unexpected ways. I am intrigued by what it means to exist outside of how we are viewed by others and how this shapes the ways we view ourselves. As an artist, I also notice how I utilise the space and resources around me for my own gain, and perhaps this is something to interrogate.

Currently, I am engaged with two courses that have encouraged risk-taking within a safe space, and I am interested in what this might look like within my own work. What form might this take? Could something that exists as a text become a photograph, or a painting, and then return again as text? What happens when forms begin to collapse into one another and these binaries begin to dissolve? Perhaps it will read as chaos, but within the form of the zine I hope it becomes exciting.

Are you a living thing that is dying or a dying thing that is living?

Emma Talbot, Copenhagen Contemporary 2025