In 2012, an artist residency at Chelsea College of Art through the national AA2A (Artists Access to Art Colleges) programme gave me an opportunity to develop my digital animation practice, drawing on historical textile designs from the 1920s in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s national collections.
The residency led to Detours, an exhibition at Wimbledon Space, London, from 3 to 25 May 2012. It became an important moment in my development, bringing together painting, textiles and moving images within a contemporary fine art gallery, while also initiating professional relationships that would continue into later projects.
Looking back, I find the exhibition’s title particularly appropriate. What began as an opportunity to learn new digital techniques became a series of encounters that changed the direction of my practice.
From Historical Pattern to Moving Image
My proposal for the AA2A residency was to investigate the possibilities of digital animation through historical textile design.
I had long been interested in how patterns generate visual movement through repetition, symmetry, rotation and colour. Textile designs can create remarkably complex rhythms within a stationary surface. I wanted to explore what might happen when those relationships were released from their fixed positions and allowed to move through time.
The residency gave me access to the facilities and technical knowledge needed to develop this investigation.
Rather than approaching animation as a departure from painting, I understood it as another way of exploring the relationships between image, surface and movement. A drawing could become a digital pattern; a pattern could become a sequence; and that sequence could suggest new possibilities for material work.
For Detours, I exhibited four wall pieces—Stone, The Undergrowth, Riverbank and The Rock—made from silk, polyester and wood. Each measured 117 × 66 cm.
My moving-image work, Sequences (2012), was presented as a six-minute DVD.
The exhibition brought these different states of the image into proximity: the material surface of the wall pieces and the temporal experience of animation.
I was interested in how one might alter the experience of the other. The wall works held their compositions in physical space, while the moving images allowed visual relationships to unfold over time.
The Value of a Detour
The exhibition emerged from the AA2A programme, which enabled artists to return to art colleges and work alongside students, technicians and other practitioners.
Eleven artists had been undertaking residencies across Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon colleges.
The original exhibition press release described the experience of returning to an art college as a departure from the often isolated conditions of studio practice. It emphasised the value of access to facilities, technical expertise and encounters with students in developing new directions for artists.
That understanding of the residency resonated with my own experience.
For me, an art college was never simply a place containing equipment. It was an environment in which different forms of knowledge could come into contact. Conversations in workshops, encounters with other disciplines and unexpected discoveries could become as consequential as the work originally proposed.
During my residency at Chelsea, I became aware of students studying MA Curating nearby. I suggested that they might curate an exhibition bringing together the AA2A resident artists as part of their course.
The proposal developed into Detours at Wimbledon Space.
Making an Exhibition Together
Detours was curated by Grazyna Dobrzanska-Redrup, Courtney Griffiths, James Harper and Daisy McMullan, students on Chelsea’s MA Curating course.
Their programme approached curating as a practice extending across physical, printed and virtual spaces rather than something confined exclusively to the conventional gallery exhibition.
That was an interesting context for a group of artists working across different media and methods of production.
The exhibition included work by Laura Braun, Jonathan Gildersleeves, Daniel Greaney, Nick Hornby, Carolyn Lefley, Kate Lyddon, Ryan McClelland, Tom Smith, Laura Taylor, Willem Weismann and myself.
Painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, ceramics and moving images occupied the same gallery, offering different responses to the experience of working within the three art colleges.
I particularly valued the opportunity to bring artists and emerging curators into conversation. The project was not simply a showcase of residency outcomes. It allowed the curators to develop an exhibition around practices they were encountering at a formative stage, while giving the artists another context in which to understand their work.
The exhibition itself became part of the learning process.
Painting in a Fine-Art Gallery
For me, Detours represented an important threshold.
Although I had previously exhibited within design, textiles and interdisciplinary contexts, this was my first opportunity to present this developing body of work in a conventional contemporary fine-art gallery alongside artists working across a broad range of media.
That change of context mattered.
My work had long crossed disciplinary boundaries, but I was increasingly conscious that the setting in which an artwork appeared could influence how it was understood.
The four silk, polyester and wood pieces were material objects, yet their patterned compositions and relationship to the accompanying moving images allowed them to be encountered through the language of painting.
The animations introduced time into that conversation.
Rather than separating textile, painting and digital media into distinct categories, the exhibition allowed their relationships to become visible.
The original gallery plan records the four wall pieces together along one wall, with Sequences presented among the moving-image works elsewhere in the gallery.
This spatial arrangement created an encounter between fixed and moving images within a wider exhibition of contemporary art.
Mechanics: The Language of Pattern
The surviving exhibition-related catalogue material also reproduces Mechanics (2012), a digital print on silk.
Its repeated geometric forms are particularly revealing of my interests at the time.
The composition draws attention to the movement that can be generated through repetition even when the image itself remains stationary. Forms appear to rotate, intersect and reorganise through the relationships established between them.
I was interested in how historical textile design could become a starting point for contemporary digital experimentation rather than simply an archive of decorative motifs.
The translation between historical reference, digital process and printed silk was part of the same investigation that informed my animations.
The image could move between technologies without losing its connection to the material history from which it emerged.
Encounters That Continued
Two important professional relationships developed from Detours.
One was with Daisy McMullan, whom I met through the curatorial project. We subsequently collaborated on The Geometrics, an exhibition concerned with contemporary textile practice, experimental processes and the often-hidden thinking involved in making.
The other was with Cynthia Corbett, who encountered my work at Wimbledon Space and subsequently invited me to participate in a group exhibition connected with the 2013 Young Masters Art Prize selection.
Neither development had been anticipated when I began the residency.
I had applied for an opportunity to develop my animation skills. The resulting exhibition expanded the context in which my work could be seen and brought me into contact with people whose interests would intersect with mine again.
This has become a recurring feature of my artistic life. An encounter that initially appears incidental can acquire significance years later.
Works in Continuance
I have returned repeatedly to the relationship between painting, textiles and moving images.
My later Drapes installations allowed digitally developed compositions to occupy architectural space through large suspended textiles. Other investigations have taken drawings and paintings into animation, allowing patterns to unfold through movement and time.
Seen retrospectively, Detours was an important early moment in this continuing investigation.
But its significance was not confined to the works themselves.
The residency gave me access to knowledge and facilities. The exhibition created a dialogue between artists and curators. Those relationships subsequently generated further projects and opportunities.
What began as an investigation into the movement of pattern became an experience of how an artistic practice itself moves between institutions, disciplines, people and places.
I increasingly understand artistic development not as a sequence of replacements, but as an accumulation of materials, techniques, encounters and relationships that remain capable of being reactivated.
Detours gave that process an unusually appropriate name.
Exhibition & Residency
Detours
Wimbledon Space, Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London
3–25 May 2012
Private view: 2 May 2012
Curated by Grazyna Dobrzanska-Redrup, Courtney Griffiths, James Harper and Daisy McMullan.
Works exhibited by Emma Neuberg:
- Stone, 2012 — silk, polyester and wood
- The Undergrowth, 2012 — silk, polyester and wood
- Riverbank, 2012 — silk, polyester and wood
- The Rock, 2012 — silk, polyester and wood
- Sequences, 2012 — DVD, 6 minutes
The four wall works each measured 117 × 66 cm.
Additional illustrated work: Mechanics, 2012 — digital print on silk.
Residency: Artists Access to Art Colleges (AA2A), Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts London, 2011–12.
Participating artists: Laura Braun, Jonathan Gildersleeves, Daniel Greaney, Nick Hornby, Carolyn Lefley, Kate Lyddon, Ryan McClelland, Emma Neuberg, Tom Smith, Laura Taylor and Willem Weismann.
Archival sources: Original Wimbledon Space exhibition press release, invitation, list of works, gallery floor plan and exhibition-related printed material, 2012.