Emily Wolfe (b.1972) moved to London over twenty years ago when she was awarded the Ryoichi Sasakawa Scholarship to study for a Master’s in Fine Arts at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Arts at University College London. Since then, Wolfe has managed to sustain an international arts practice with regular exhibitions both in Aotearoa and the UK. These days, she is based in Oxford, where she lives in an old Victorian house with historian husband and daughter.
Wolfe immerses herself in the traditions and reveries of trompe l’oeil and its charismatic illusory qualities. A collector of antiquities and curiosities, she sets obscure and often broken objects and materials against backdrops of old master styled landscape paintings, which themselves have the appearance of having been salvaged from the dusty interiors of second-hand stores or boxes destined for garage sales.
Wolfe’s paintings are permeated by an emotional charge and a lingering wistful narrative. The artist has a preoccupation with objects that are redundant, discarded, and overlooked, or which are visibly worn and tattered, carrying the physical marks of their age and history. The artist has a tendency towards the tactile details of material; lace curtains, creased tablecloths, post-it notes stuck to glassy windowpanes. Folded sheets of paper in shades of pink, cream and white are tacked over the landscapes with strips of yellowing tape, their edges charmingly uneven or curling upward as if we could reach out and peel them off the surface.
Wolfe draws our attention to the act of image making, simultaneously disrupting and perpetuating the illusion of the image and the nature of its construction as a series of intersecting planes. Small cropped details sit above a larger image. A piece of discarded paper in the foreground mimics the curve of a bent and broken branch in the background. Through a piece of gossamer paper, we glimpse the indistinct features of the landscape behind. Time is expertly conflated in these works, collapsing it in on itself as if merely by accident instead of careful artifice. Positioned at the boundary between the painted world and the physical one, at the threshold between dream and reality, Wolfe’s delicate paper trails lead us in ever-increasing circles, continuously looping back on ourselves.
These paintings begin with paper collages. The raw material for them comes from photocopies of prints of 18th century landscape paintings, from coloured paper, cellophane, cardboard, or any other scraps of paper or detritus I might find in my studio. The paintings make reference to the process of recording archaeological excavations, something I became interested in after a period spent working on a variety of sites with the Museum of London Archaeology. The two processes of painting and excavating are connected in my mind. Each process involves layering and stratification and the consequent emergence of narratives.