Pictures from my heart

Installation of 100 drawings on shelves, 65 in one piece, 35 drawings in two other installations.

Pictures From My Heart features a selection of extraordinary drawings made by Emma Talbot following the death of her husband, Paul. These drawings grew out of a desire not only for emotional honesty but also for a simplification of her working process. These drawings did not spring from some presumed year zero of the artist’s practice, There are nuances here and creative decisions, which Talbot has honed over the years through her paintings. Yet there is also a new fearlessness, the sense that we are looking at the work of an artist at an important pinnacle of her career – the point where the artist has become so embedded with the work – that life and art are no longer separate and in Talbot’s sophisticated and sure hand a truly unique new language emerges.

"Pictures From My Heart comprised three installations of drawings, sitting on rows of thin black shelving. The drawings are all of a similar size and medium but range in style. Abstractions of lines and geometric patterns, texts, and figurative descriptions are installed as groups, with spaces between some drawings so as not to suggest an ordered reading from left to right.

The drawings can be read individually and in connection with each other but they do not form a single ‘story’. The aim of the work was to use drawing to connect pictorial representations of real life events from the past and present with less pictorial thoughts such as psychological states and poetic notions without using pre-existing structures for visual narrative (e.g. story board, graphic novel or single image painting).

The rationale for this mode of working is to convey the complexity of thought and memory alongside the narrative of love and loss, which is the subject of the work. I propose that every event we experience is understood via our own psychological structures, that memory is subjective and narratives are reconstructive representations of our thoughts without clear form.

The use of shelving references meaningful items (momentos - postcards, photos) propped on a mantelpiece. Watercolour on paper provided a direct form of mark making, closest to note-taking, yet not a writing instrument, and was chosen for its lightness as a medium, so as not to reference historical narrative painting, to be close to the lightness of thought." --Emma Talbot.

• http://www.transitiongallery.co.uk/htmlp...
• http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists...