Emma Neuberg presents her first large-scale installation, Drapes, at Plymouth Gallery in 2016. Using fabric as a volumetric and structural medium, the piece conveys a sense of dominance, irrefutability and takeover in the white, cuboid space. Combining notions of the female gaze, tactility and dominance, the artist promotes a dialogue around what it is be a woman evolving in patriarchal culture.
First commissioned by curator Hannah Rose at Plymouth Gallery for the gallery’s Textile Season, Neuberg demonstrates how textiles stimulate preconceptions of expectation, assumption and meaning. The work’s title, Drapes, is attributed the epistemology of drapeaux, draped and draping and alludes to western histories where flags and women have been draped in order to to assign and promote cultural signs and signifiers. Drapes invites you to walk through in states of knowing and unknowing and evokes feelings of wandering, unfolding, repetition and propaganda.
Measuring 11.5 x 13 x 16 feet (3.5m x 4m x 5m), the piece is divided into ten sections with each fabric unit presenting superflat color in repeating patterns that echo each other.
The surrounding walls showcase Neuberg’s Grid Drawings and Sequences animations that convey the abstracted stories of thwarted cultural voices and the female gaze.
The Plymouth Gallery show was open to the public 10th January – 23rd February 2016.
Photo credit: Sarah Packer
