Emily Speed is an artist based at The Royal Standard in Liverpool where she works in performance, installation, sculpture, drawing and artists’ books.

 

Emily explores the temporary and the transient through reference to architecture and the body. Examining buildings, both literally and metaphorically, as physical shelters and as containers for memory, her work explores how built space is bound with the history of its occupiers.Often creating precarious forms in her work, Speed is interested in how architecture represents an especially poignant example of transience; man’s attempt to create permanence and legacy through building.

 

Recent works are  based around the psychology of space, which has resulted in a number of performative sculptures that are a kind of temporary architectural furniture.   The idea of shelter and the inhabitant is at the core of much of her work; how a person is shaped by the buildings they have occupied and how a person occupies their own psychological space. The word inhabitant contains the root habit (dress) and implies a habitat (dwelling) and Emily's sculptures often have this double function of being both shelter and clothing or masquerade. Works like Mattdress & Drawers and Inhabitant are worn and performed, using somewhat absurd spaces constructed specifically to fit the artist's body. These constructions protect and make her vulnerable in equal measure.

Emily will present a newly commissioned work at the Bluecoat, Liverpool for Topophobia, open 3rd March - 22nd April. http://topophobia.co.uk/venues/bluecoat/

 

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For more details of her current and past projects visit:  www.emilyspeed.co.uk

 

 

Top image: Mattdress & Drawers - 2011

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