AirSpace Graduate Residency 2015-16 - Meet the artists - Emilie Atkinson

AirSpace Gallery welcomes two new artists onto our Graduate Residency Scheme. Starting in August, Emilie Atkinson and Jenna Naylor will be spending 6 months progressing their works from their degree shows towards solo exhibitions at AirSpace in January 2016.

Emilie Atkinson is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, currently based in London. Her practice explores the place of black humour and satire in providing efficacious representations of weighty topics such as sex and death. She reflects upon cultural labeling that leads to misconceptions. Combining multiple viewpoints she highlights the absurdity of our stereotyping. Through simple manipulations of both ‘things’ and images, truer versions of objects emerge and myth is revealed. These concerns are approached through film, photography and object making.

 

Boa, 2014, Myrtillo cactus schenckii cactus, rope,homemade butternut squash and beetroot pasta, quails egg, 200cm x 25cm (height variable)

Lummox Fish, 2013,blue plastic string, curing chorizo sausage, fish, Perspex screens, projection, 200cm x 3cm (height variable).

Detail of LummoxFish, 2013.

During her six-month residency at AirSpace, Emilie will aim to take Stoke as her starting point. Taking preconceived ideas of the city and combining them with stories she hears during her time as a resident of Stoke she hopes to disclose it’s myths through acknowledging the importance of the ‘things’ that make it the place it is. Whilst making this new body of work Emilie hopes to start to bring together the sculptural and lens-based sides of her practice- acknowledging the nature of photograph and screen as object as well as the place of her sculptural objects as protagonists in front of the camera.

Emilie will be keeping an A-N blog charting her residency progress which can be found here
https://www.a-n.co.uk/person/emilie-atkinson  

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The AirSpace Gallery Graduate Residency Scheme was set up in 2012 to enhance the prospects of Graduate retention and attraction in Stoke-on-Trent. 6 graduates have so far benefitted from its offer of 6 months free studio space within a thriving artist led space, regular professional development and artist support and mentoring both from within the Gallery and external professional artists towards the end-of-residency solo exhibition.