Emily Oades
Degree: Fine Art
University: University of Leeds
Graduation Year: 2022
New Blood Art Commentary
In these arresting, monumental paintings the mood is nevertheless light – ecstatic, even – just as the application of the oil paint is light, deftly done. Compositionally her paintings will have many centres: equilibrium through multiplicity; vertical and horizontal cascades. They feel cellular in their symmetric / asymmetric rhythm. Layers upon layers of paint come together to represent embodied desire.
Usually Emily’s paintings are overwhelmingly abstract, but on occasion coalesce into recognisable scenes, or glimpses of human forms. They do so in such a way as to reconsider distinctions between abstract and figurative scenes. Both entail an essential energy: the painter’s line, whether transcribing an abstract shape or gesture, or the shape of a limb or head, conveys electricity.
These paintings have ambition, and recall Cecily Brown’s protean sensuality, with the four edges of the painting containing the four dimensions transcribed onto the canvas. Brown has said, “I think that painting is a kind of alchemy. The paint is transformed into image, and paint and image transform themselves into a third and new thing.” From Emily Oades’ work you also receive this impression: paint is both material artifice, and substance imbued with life.
Artist Statement
Observing the representations and criticisms surrounding desire and eroticism, my work fixates upon the emergence of intimate and private moments, as figural bodies share sensual interactions which are revealed through the medium of oil painting. Explicit scenes stretch across the surfaces, exploring the eroticism of these instances and pushing the medium further each time, creating visually dynamic and atmospheric moments, blurring a line between the figurative and abstraction. Continually questioning how concealment and ambience could alter sexually charged or explicit scenes. The ambiguous fluidity of brushstrokes enveloped in layers upon layers is challenged and elevated, with the painterly properties of oil easily manipulated through surfaces, mediums and application.
With the frequent gestural marks sprawling across the surface, these obscured paintings begin to suggest subtle bodily features and objects through the progressive layers, hinting at the carnal desires which are both exhibited and concealed from the viewer through forms. Tangled layers with both the environment and bodies unify them as one and transform the figures to become absorbed into one another, disfigured but harmonious.
The viewers eyes never cease to rest upon one spot, continually following the stream of warping and intertwined forms and flesh.
Group Exhibitions
(2022) Sitting With It, University of Leeds, Leeds
(2022) Baker's Dozen, Pop-up Space: Humber Street, Hull
(2022) The Body and Things We Do With It, Project Space, Leeds