Emily Wardill

For her newly commissioned video "Night 4 Day," Wardill has used the fake relationship between a mother and a son to think about what would happen if a communist revolutionary gave birth to a techno utopian, if gender as performitivity was thought through the lens of women making the political decision to live clandestinely in Portugal for a larger part of the 20th century and if the "Last Woman" were the fem bot from "The Tales of Hoffman."

Holding in her mind Dorothea Tanning’s painting Some Roses and their Phantoms (1952) and its sickening presentation of objects as between states of being, Wardill made a film that also hovers between definitions. The architecture of the Gulbenkian auditorium in Lisbon, its colors and sense of being lost in time accompany us through a loop where a man wanders the building at night, followed by something that is not human. Through the care and paranoia with which she approaches the digital image, the artist investigates the past’s haunting of the present and the remnants of textures longing to be touched. Wardill’s work takes an interest in the appropriation of models to express ideas and the way in which fixed scenarios become exemplary. She explores the opacity of communication to deconstruct the way in which materials or the implication of the material are used to elucidate ideas.

In 2007 Picture This and Film London Artist's Moving Image Network commissioned Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck through the Bristol Mean Time residency. The film takes audiences into dark allegorical scenes depicting religious iconography, outmoded superstition, and slapstick comedy. Sick Serena employs imagery from British ecclesiastic stained glass to create a visually and conceptually rich, dense and multi-layered film. The work references Pier Paolo Pasolini's controversial 1963 short film La Ricotta, for which he was imprisoned for blasphemy on the basis of 'enacting' a religious scene as a comedy sketch. The scenes that unfold invoke both a sense of unease and amusement.