Emma Fielden: The Sky Swallowed a Stone

Multidisciplinary Australian artist Emma Fielden uses performance, video, painting and drawing to explore ideas of infinity, time, memory and transformation.

Her work tests the liminal spaces of what we might perceive as tangible and intangible, macro and micro, infinite and intimate.

Grounded in materiality, she engages with substances like metal and stone, exploring their capacity for change.

‘The Sky Swallowed a Stone’ brings together a collection of new process-driven paintings, where a final painting is a testament to the actions and decisions involved in its creation and an unfolding that never quite settles.

Through her practice, she explores the dynamic relationship between materials and ideas, with her body acting as a bridge between their physical properties and the abstract concepts that unfold through her engagement with them.

The exhibition also features documentation of the performance Dialogue 2020, which uses stone as a material to bridge time and distance, embodying the complex weight of geological, material, and human histories and interactions. Video documentation of the durational performance features a large limestone boulder repeatedly struck with hammers.

It is presented alongside the original boulder, its rubble and two large photographs that capture wall drawings created during the performance, where fragments of limestone are scattered, leaving traces on the studio walls.

Image: Emma Fielden, Dialogue 2020. Performance with limestone. Video stills and excerpt from HD video with sound. Image courtesy of the artist