Rory Emmett
AVA Exhibition: A Collection To A Degree (Group Show) | 06.03.25 16.04.25
Rory Emmett adopts a self reflexive and critical approach to representation through his use of painting, installation, performance and video. His MFA project titled Working Remains (2021-2022) grappled with colonial legacies and their remnants inscribed on the cultural, socio-political and topographical contemporary Cape landscape. The remnants suggested by the project’s title pertain to concerns about identity formation, place, labour and cultural hybridity that permeate personal and collective history and memory. This group show includes key pieces from Working Remains, including the video work titled Refrain (2022), and the installation titled Conversation (Among Artisans). Refrain considers the act of holding a place in mind while performing an imaginative gesture. The video of this event is a symbolic gesture and performative ceremony for someone or something that has transitioned. In making a three-piece suit out of hessian, Emmett draws on sartorial forms of self-fashioning, making the body a site of inscription and meaning. The use of painters’ hessian dropsheets in Conversation (Among Artisans) marks his ongoing interests in making visible - processes of labour that produce capital. A rich typography of collected marks sits on the surfaces collected from various worksites of significance, including from the artist’s father and other trade painters. Similarly, paradoxical realities of solidity and malleability within personhood transform to surface and extends these concepts to various forms, from facewipes inscribed with gestural traces, to shapeshifting delft ceramic keepsakes.
Rory Emmett lives and works as an artist and educator in Cape Town, South Africa. He completed his BAFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 2014, where he majored in painting and won the Judy Steinberg Painting Prize in his final year. Emmett was a Sasol New Signatures merit award winner in 2015, has exhibited locally and abroad, and his work can be found in several private and corporate collections. He completed his MFA with distinction at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 2022.
Instagram: @roryemmett
