Emily Wardill’s work explores how social meanings are projected onto objects, and throws such processes into reverse. Her deconstructed filmic and performative exercises are at once formal and hallucinatory, emphasising the irreducible qualities of the material.
Through an unlocking of these scenarios, objects and events she hopes to question a hierarchical or closed structure of knowledge, to offer possible alternatives to aesthetics which become linked to certain ‘meanings’ and to question modes of communications themselves , using ‘stages towards understanding’ as ‘stages’ in the theatrical sense. Wardill works across a variety of different media; from a Re-staging the Black Feast in Huysman’s A Rebours to slapstick fictions based around allegory within British Stained Glass.
Emily Wardill was born in 1977, and lives in London. She is a Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art. Her solo projects include Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck at the ICA, London .In 2006 she featured in the Art Now Lightbox programme at Tate Britain, and in 2007 her work was shown at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Witte de With, Rotterdam and the London Film Festival . This Summer she is showing in group exhibitions at the Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Kunstahalle, Basel, Reykjavik Art Museum and is undertaking a residency at the Kunstverein, Wiesbaden.
