In 2023 Emma Hart brought together with Dean Kenning, 22 artists that come from a working class background for the exhibition Poor Things at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. The exhibition questioned sculpture through the lens of social class and vice versa. For the catalogue they interviewed each artist. They ALL said, it had taken them a long time to stop making the art they thought they were expected to make in art school and start making the art they really wanted to make. Hart reflected on her own practice and realised she wasn’t making the work they wanted to make either. She really want to make art that transmits JOY. For reasons that this Stanley Picker Fellowship could investigate, she was embarrassed to be joyful within my practice and the art world. Hart began to rectify this when she made a rave out of cardboard for Art Night, 2023 and importantly designed a cafe for Modern Art Oxford that generated a basement party.
Hart’s ambition for the sculptures is that they generate a one to one address with the viewer; that at the moment they are encountered the viewer understands the artwork is for them, in real time. She have recently discovered Stephen Wright’s writing, and his concept of “usership,” of art, and his notion of 1:1 scale. He is referring to art practices that focus on being used and engaged with and by people, rather than simply being observed or displayed as object. Hart’s own sculptures might be viewed as objects by Stephen Wright, but if they generate joy would that make them useful and used?
For her Stanley Picker Fellowship Hart wants to expand further the idea of there being a link between 1:1 scale and how an artwork is used, and whether joy is useful. The Fellowship offers her the opportunity to incorporate and learn about ‘design’ (objects to be used by human hands, she thinks design is mostly set to a 1:1 scale) and what is design’s relationship to joy. Collectors of art and design, a good example being Stanley Picker Gallery, often articulate how much joy their collection brings them. Yet, if she goes to see an exhibition in a public gallery and say “I love it”, she feels her response might be regarded as insufficient. The plan for her Fellowship is to make joyful things and ask who gets to feel joy in front of art AND design, and what kind of things or objects she makes, get to do the most joy work?
Biography
Emma Hart lives and works in London. Hart makes exuberant ceramic sculptures, which test the limits of the medium, pushing clay to go beyond being a vessel. Hart’s vivid sculptures actively confront the viewer often by jutting out from the wall or physically encroaching on the viewer’s personal space. Hart has recently focused on the use of speech in relation to class and upbringing. As Hart puts it ‘If you come from a working class background and are trying to be some body in this middle class artworld then you are more than likely to also feel split. Split between the world of kinship you grew up in, and the ambitious art world you’ve entered. Your mouth, how you speak, holds your history, and gives you away as soon as you open it.’
In 2023 Hart created the permanent artwork Hear Now! for the public entrance of the new UCL East building in London. In 2024 Emma Hart’s Club Together opened, a major permanent installation for Modern Art Oxford in the form of a 60 seat cafe. In 2022 she was awarded a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award. In 2017 she won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery, and in 2015 she was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award for Visual Art.
Major solo exhibitions include Big Time (Hospitalfield, Scotland 2023 and Frieze Sculpture, London 2022), Big Mouth, (Barakat Contemporary, Seoul, 2022); Banger (Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 2018), Mamma Mia! (Whitechapel Gallery, London, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, 2017), Giving It All That (Folkestone Triennial 2014) and Dirty Looks (Camden Arts Cente, 2013). She has participated in group exhibitions, notably presenting work in the ceramic survey Strange Clay at the Hayward Gallery (London, 2022-23); Somerset House (London, 2021); Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund (Dortmund, 2019); Kunsthaus Hamburg (Hamburg, 2018). Hart co-curated and took part in the major sculpture group show, Poor Things at Fruitmarket (Scotland, 2023).
Hart was included in the 2017 Phaidon publication Vitamin C, a global survey of 100 of today’s most important clay and ceramic artists. In 2024 Hart is included in a new book by Phaidon Press called Great Women Sculptors. The book will present around 300 of the most significant and preeminent women sculptors from around the world and across time.
Hart’s work is held in public collections including the Arts Council Collection, The Government Art Collection and the British Council Collection.
Hart studied Fine Art at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, graduating with an MA (2004), and received a PhD degree in Fine Art at Kingston University (2013).
