Unbuilt Library

Next week I will have some small works, some that date as far back as 2005, leaving the studio for the first time to be exhibited at Mrs Rick’s Cupboard (thanks for the invitation Craig Fisher):

Fragment

P.V: 12 February 2015 (7 – 9pm)

13 February – 26 March 2015    Open Friday 12-4pm

Mrs Rick’s Cupboard is pleased to invite you to our next exhibition, ‘Unbuilt Library’ by Emily Speed.

Each model in the Unbuilt Library is a reading room designed for the reading of a specific book or text, with space for only one or very occasionally, two readers.  Speed is interested in the relationship between the body and architecture and the book/spaces featured in this library all make this connection and have been particularly influential on Speed’s practice; literature is often a significant part of her research. The shape, materials and size of these intimate spaces are chosen according to the text itself, taking cues from the events, characters and tone. The models (or perhaps, unrealised sculptures) have been made over a long period of time, the earliest in 2007 and the most recent in 2015. 

The architectural model itself is also of great interest to Speed as a medium that presents an ideal; existing as pure potential. Models are delicate, yet symbolic of power, because they can be held and even destroyed by human hands (the city, literally in your grasp) and they also provide an unusual situation, where one can be fully outside of a space and see the whole.

Mrs Rick’s Cupboard

33 Seely Road
Nottingham
NG7 1NU
United Kingdom

Photomonitor/Sculpture

October: work has begun at the British School at Rome, where I am very happily living and working until the end of the year as the Derek Hill Foundation Scholar (picture of marble cabinet here, which I am currently spending quite a bit of time exploring).

marble

Anneka French has written an essay on my Body/Building polaroid works for Photomonitor this month and there is also a four-page feature on my work by Robert Preece in the October issue of Sculpture magazine with a small extract available online here.

photomonitorsculpture

 

Strange Business & Cities of Ash

I’m very pleased to be in great company in two exhibitions at the moment, ‘Strange Business’ at SYSON, Nottingham and ‘Cities of Ash’ at g39, Cardiff.


Apricot Stairs


STRANGE BUSINESS

New Watercolour Painting

Gordon Dalton, Lois Gardner Sabet, Anneliese Krueger, Yelena Popova, Oliver Raymond-Barker, Beth Shapeero, Emily Speed, Oliver Tirre

24 July – 19 September 2014

STRANGE BUSINESS is a group exhibition of new watercolour painting presented by SYSON in Nottingham. This exhibition features works using a traditional yet versatile type of painting, which is often overlooked or perceived as old fashioned. Watercolours in this exhibition comprise studies of opacity and transparency, and explore colour saturation, site specificity, found objects and sculptural forms. Often drawing upon highly personal subjects and areas of interest, works featured include preparatory studies, explorations of natural materials, installations and film and video – attempting to explore what JMW Turner recognised the activity of painting to be; ‘a strange business’, and artists undertake the task of painting with water and colour in the broadest sense.

CITIES OF ASH

Rob Voerman, Colin Booth, Emily Speed, Hannah Waldron, Isabelle Hayeur, James Moore, Robin Tarbet

12 July – 13 September

Flexing the architectural imagination, the artists in Cities of Ash offer the god-like experience of model city panoramas found in civic museums or on observation decks of towering skyscrapers. They each engage in the pursuit of obscuring the urban experience with a fantasy veil, leaving glimpses between its brushstrokes.

 

Littoral Zone

Littoral ZoneThis new installation work is a commission from Plymouth Arts Centre and it opens tonight! The exhibition is on until 25th May so do pop in if you’re in the area.

“In thinking about proxemics and repetitive behaviour Speed began this piece of work by visiting the south Devon coastline. Observing beaches as a site of constant change and regeneration, she related this back to human efforts at building and creating territory; forming an idea for a filmed performance at South Milton Sands (also known as Thurlestone Sands).

Now edited, looped and integrated within the installation, multiple projections hint at the attempt, by a locally recruited group of volunteers, to build a temporary suburb. Battered by the wind and fighting with the customised and awkward windbreaks they hammer away in a Keaton-esque fashion to create a space of their own making. Equally impermanent, Speed has designed a structure comprised of a series of dividing walls for the gallery, creating liminal spaces that mirror those we see in the films. These walls never allow the viewer to be inside or outside, but always in-between.”

A massive thank you to Gillespie Yunnie Architects for their sponsorship.

 

Sexy films

I made this film. Essentially a valentine’s card, it’s short but has a sexy soundtrack and features the ultimate erotic architecture; several ‘crotch shots’ where walls and ceilings meet in the pavilions in the Giardini della Biennale in Venice.

sexy films

Architecture is the Ultimate Erotic Act, 2014 (2 mins 15 seconds), made especially for Sex Shop.

SEX SHOP is an artist-run distribution network for social products. Just like sex it brings together people from all walks of life. Just like a shop it distributes useful goods.
Valentine’s Day
14/02/2014
from 6pm
20 Parade Mews London SE27 9AX
@sexshopdistro

 

Available at Sex Shop for £2 from 14th February or for £3 by post. Email me if you’d like one.