Rising Star Emily Motto to be the next artist in residence April – May 2018 Fine Art, Bolton School of the Arts
We are very pleased to have Emily Motto joining to undertake the next micro residency in Fine Art, Bolton School of the Arts in association with neo:artists (April – May 2018) Fresh out of the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, Oxford University (2014) Emily was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries ICA, London , Saatchi New Sensations and shortlisted for The Woon Art Prize. Two years later her work was selected to be part of what is the Future of Art (2016) exhibition in the Turbine Hall during the new Tate Modern’s opening weekend.
Since graduating her work has gained significant interest and exposure; exhibiting internationally from one show to the next in London, Zurich, Mexico City and Rome. Emily has also been invited to take part in commissions, festivals and residencies and has been the recipient of several prestigious awards. Including The Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship 2017/18 through which she has recently completed a residency at The British School of Rome.
Emily Motto will be our third artist in residence, preceded by Anastasia Mina and Nichola Guastamacchia. The micro residency is a joint venture between Bolton School of The Arts and neo:artists and creates a great opportunity for students on the BA (Hons) and MA Fine Art Programmes to engage with and work alongside a professionally emerging artist. An artist’s talk and masterclass workshop takes place during their stay. The month long residency gives the resident artist time and space to develop new work using state of the art facilities across the university. The artist receives on-going support from neo:artists directors and curators throughout their stay, with opportunities to meet with regional artists and initiatives in an extended social network. The students benefit from having direct contact with an aspiring artist and unique opportunity to see them engage in the development of a specific project in a professional capacity.
Motto works across disciplines of sculpture, installation and drawing. Her approach is exploratory and plays with the interface between the body, digital and the physical space they inhabit. Her work cannot be reigned in to one discipline; indeed it thrives on pushing boundaries conceptually and practically, leading to dynamically charged work that provokes an imaginative visceral response. Her innovative synthesis of everyday materials has marked her out as an artist to watch; on one occasion she even invented her own dough to manipulate through fabrics and wires resulting in living matter that takes on agency of its own.
In speaking on her own work in a recent interview Emily said; I love to make playful forms that perform and evolve throughout, and beyond, my creation of them – especially in terms of their shape, and the physicality of the unstable materials that I build them from. When creating parasites I was inspired by how the materials I made and used fed off each other’s properties; the net, dough and string of my sculpture series structurally supporting each other, and these responses creating new, and often quite fragile, symbiotic forms.
I am endlessly curious of how bodies contain and consume space, and how those spaces are used and perceived. Recently I have been working with grids as transformation devices – attempting to contain, tame and control organic material, and am excited by how they themselves can become malleable in the process. In a recent interview by Elephant , Rosalind Duguid observed Motto’s approach to sculpture is a lot about knowing when to let the materials get on with their lives.
We look forward to welcoming Emily who will join us after the Easter Break for her month long residency.
University of Bolton Fine Art 