ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART – EMMA NEUBERG

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…