On the land of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, Award-winning artist Emily Parsons-Lord makes visually stunning, embodied installations and performances. They elicit wonder and provoke critical re-examination of some of our most fundamental materials: air and explosions. These materials of the climate crisis speak to both the invisibility and the spectacle of collapse, and the confluence of personal and environmental catastrophe.
Air is simultaneously local and global, encompassing the effects of breathing as well as the governance of polluters and policy-makers. Air is where what we jettison into seeming oblivion is caught and returned. It is a physical site, as well as a place to project our imaginations. An explosion is an extreme condition of air, a rapid state of transformation from one state to another. By shifting our experience of time to a geological timescale, the rapidity of change since the industrial revolution makes it clear that we are exploding. This is how it feels to explode. Through air and explosions Emily’s work interrogates the experience of witnessing this expanded unstable moment of multiple simultaneous catastrophes. It shifts in register and scale from the sublime to the relatable, humorous and queer.
Emily has built a national and international profile for her experimental practice, exhibiting at the Kunst Haus Wien 2022 alongside renowned artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Marina Abramovic, and Roman Signor, she featured in the Bristol Biennale, 2016, List i Ljosi festival Iceland, 2018, and the prestigious 4A Beijing Residency 2019, where she was mentored by Mr Shen Shaomin. Her TedX talk was selected for international editions, she was Art Collector’s no. 1 artist to watch in 2019. In 2020, Emily won the Churchie Emerging Art Prize.
Nationally, Emily’s work’s featured in Primavera MCA, 2016, NSW Fellowship Emerging in 2017/2021 at Artspace, Liveworks 2017 at Carriageworks, Performance Contemporary at Carriageworks 2018, Climate Century at Vitalstatistix, Adelaide 2018, the John Fries Award, Ravenswood Art prize, Blake Prize and was part of the opening exhibition at Bundanon Museum 2022. Following her 4A Beijing residency in 2019, in 2020 she undertook a development exploring the explosion as a site of extreme political, emotional, and physical enquiry.
