POSTER – EMMA NEUBERG

At the Podium

On 29th January 2016, I gave an artist’s talk, Shadow Fabric, to a full auditorium at Plymouth College of Art and Design, followed by a curatorial interview with Zoe Li. The presentation accompanied my solo exhibition at Plymouth’s Mirror Gallery, where I was showing new painting, animation and large-scale draped installations.

Behind me, the cinema screen displayed images of the artworks, experiments and processes that had contributed to the exhibition. I spoke about the development of my practice, including my work with The Geometrics, and how those investigations had informed the paintings and sculptural forms presented at Plymouth.

I have always enjoyed public speaking. There is something energising about bringing the private processes of the studio into a shared space…

At Friday Lates

In November 2015, Melanie Bowles and I returned to the Victoria and Albert Museum with The People’s Print to present a participatory design workshop for the museum’s Friday Late programme, alongside its major exhibition The Fabric of India.

Working with designs by our collaborator Nasima Rumi Begum, we invited visitors to create their own textile compositions using cut-out imagery and heat-transfer printing. Participants selected and arranged elements from Nasima’s collaged drawings before heat-pressing their designs onto tote bags, creating individual objects to take home.

It was an extraordinary evening. The museum was packed with visitors and our workshop attracted a continuous stream of enthusiastic participants. There was a wonderful energy in the room as people experimented with colour, composition and pattern, discovering how quickly a simple arrangement of shapes could become something personal.

This was precisely what Melanie and I had set out to achieve with The People’s Print: to make design accessible through participation, bringing together artistic expertise, digital and traditional processes, and the creative contributions of the public…

Mini Skylons: Gender, Plastic and the British Council

Between 1998 and 2000, my work was selected for a British Council touring exhibition of recent Royal College of Art graduates, travelling internationally as a representation of emerging British art and design.

For me, the selection felt like a breakthrough.

But the work that achieved it had begun as an experiment in something rather more uncomfortable: what kinds of visual language were being recognised as serious contemporary design?

Running Postmodernism at the V&A

In autumn 2011, Melanie Bowles and I launched Born to Be Wild, an experimental textile design workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, alongside the exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990. Working through our newly established enterprise, The People’s Print, we invited participants to explore the visual language of Postmodernism and collectively create a digitally printed silk swatchbook.

The project brought together nine participants who began as strangers and became collaborators. Through drawing, collage, digital design, discussion and voting, they developed a shared collection of patterns that belonged to the group. The resulting Born to Be Wild Swatchbook was both a beautiful material object and an experiment in collective authorship: a way of transforming the experience of a museum exhibition into something new, personal and enduring…

At the Science Museum – Painting with Plastic: The Challenge of Materials, 1997

In 1997, my experimental printed plastics were presented at the Science Museum in London for the opening of its new Challenge of Materials gallery. I developed two works, an inflatable chair and a dress, using techniques I had pioneered at the Royal College of Art for printing highly reflective, holographic effects onto transparent plastic surfaces.

The invitation came through Dr Susan Mossman at the Science Museum, who recognised the potential of my research into the transformation of industrial plastics. It was an exciting opportunity to take work developed through my PhD into a major public institution, where it could enter into dialogue with objects by established designers and manufacturers…

Textile Futures at the ICA: Plastic, Virtual Worlds and New Possibilities

In October 2008, my work was included in Textile Futures in Second Life, an experimental exhibition presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, by the Textile Futures Research Group at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

The project, led by Professor Jane Harris, translated physical textile works and material processes into a virtual environment. My contribution grew out of the experimental plastic surfaces I had developed during my PhD at the Royal College of Art. These were reimagined digitally as surfaces applied to self-supporting, inflatable structures, allowing the materials to inhabit an entirely different kind of space.

It was a fascinating proposition. A material that I had spent years printing, embossing, layering and manipulating could now be separated from its physical properties and given another life in a computer-generated world. From the RCA to Textile Futures…

Receiving My Doctorate at the Royal Albert Hall, 2000

In 2000, I received my PhD from the Royal College of Art at a convocation ceremony held at the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington, London. The doctorate was presented by Sir Christopher Frayling, marking the completion of five years of studio-based research in the RCA’s School of Materials.

It was a memorable occasion, and an opportunity to reflect on an intensive period of experimentation that fundamentally changed the way I thought about materials, making and artistic practice. It was during these years that I developed an approach to monoprinting that remains central to my work today: allowing the material itself to create the mark, rather than directing every gesture with a brush…

At the RCA

In 2000, I presented Faux Pas, a collection of experimental printed plastic handbags, at the Royal College of Art’s graduation exhibition in London. The work marked the culmination of five years of doctoral research into the decorative and expressive possibilities of industrial polymers, and challenged the aesthetic conventions that had shaped our relationship with plastics throughout much of the twentieth century.

The title Faux Pas was deliberately provocative. I was interested in the idea that printed, patterned or embellished plastics had come to represent a kind of bad taste within the Modernist design tradition. Plastics were often celebrated for their smooth, shiny, monochrome surfaces, their apparent perfection and their ability to embody a vision of technological progress. But I wondered whether this ideal of pristine newness had also contributed to their short-lived cultural value.

A glossy plastic surface can look immaculate when it leaves the factory. Yet scratches, scuffs, discolouration and other signs of use may quickly undermine the very qualities that made it desirable.

I began to question whether the aesthetic expectations placed upon plastics had helped establish their reputation as disposable materials…

Work in Progress at the Royal College of Art, 1997

In 1997, I presented a collection of experimental printed inflatable sculptures at the Royal College of Art’s Work in Progress exhibition, alongside fellow artists and designers from the School of Materials. The works introduced a technique I had been developing for combining highly reflective printed surfaces with transparent, inflatable plastics, opening up new possibilities for colour, light, pattern and three-dimensional form.

I was exploring how industrial sheet plastics could be transformed through textile printing processes. By applying reflective decorative effects to transparent surfaces and then inflating them, I could create objects in which the printed image interacted with the volume of air inside. Light passed through the plastic, bounced off the reflective surfaces and changed according to the viewer’s position.

The results were quite unlike conventional printed textiles or solid sculpture. The structures were simultaneously transparent and reflective, substantial and almost weightless…