from Tom Sharman on 10 Dec 2020
Emma Hart’s sculptures are coming for you. Moulded into the guise of everyday objects, previously ranging from banal clipboards and suburban satellite dishes to surreal comic book speech bubbles, her fired clay gestures protrude from walls getting in your face and into your space. Hart’s new series of sculptures for her first solo exhibition at The Sunday Painter continue to appear somewhat unruly and impolite, while adopting a more aggressive or impatient tone. A row of table tennis bats with extended handles hinge from the walls like bendy arms dangling in the air about to land a punch. Or perhaps a slap. Or a swat. Alongside them a series of megaphones with mouthpieces jutting out from the wall seemingly shout (inaudibly) through their amplifying cones. The megaphone sculptures are succinct conceptual gestures performing the action of the objects they depict. When discussing them in her studio Hart drills down into these sculptural fragments further: they’re not a description of an object, but a physical manifestation of the verb, insisting “it’s not a sculpture of a megaphone, it’s a sculpture of what a megaphone does”. Her attention to detail, distinguishing between the noun and the verb, sets out the vocabulary for this whole new body of work which deflects and reflects meaning in different directions.
https://thesundaypainter.co.uk