Emer O'Brien

Emer O’Brien’s work is a meditative mix of photography, light and film, shrouded in darkness and melancholia. Since graduating from Goldsmiths in 2003 she has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, including The Whitechapel Gallery (2004), The Royal Academy (2008) and The Wapping Project (2009)

Ian Jeffery compares her work to the New Sculpture of 1960s, as images for and of consciousness, but identifies her true theme as being that of absence. These desolate and inadequate structures, encroached by the organic world are the residual frames of something that once stood before, with a significance now lost and formerly containing things, which have now disappeared. They present us with the predicament of the subject at large in the world: faced with our own substance, materiality and sheer presence. We are confronted with the absence of that about which all the rest has been constructed, a centre or source capable of infusing the world with significance or meaning. It is a vision from the great beyond, a shelter beyond the pale, a desert in which the sands of time have eroded and washed away all but the most rudimentary traces of what stood before and have erased everything of substance, meaning and gravitas.

Her first solo show at FERREIRA PROJECTS ‘Journeys Into A Bright World’ can be read as a journey from dark into light, from the potent animalistic body, site of dark unknowable desires and drives, to an ideal image of the horse, one that invokes notions of domestication, of a perfected and unfettered docility. Together with the inherent anthropomorphism of the portrait form, this subdued animality reflects our own enmeshed site within culture and civility. The social and semantic ties of the cultural world proscribe, re-direct, diminish and yet focus the jouissance of our primal desires and drives, re-forging this base materiality towards an otherworldly ideal. It is an implicit cultivation and the choice of the horse as subject, with its heritage of agriculture and warfare, perfectly instantiates this; we are both the products and tools of our own civility, our own domestication.

Exhibitions:
Journeys Into A Bright World
PURE_photography