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."

An experimental short inspired by the music of Gladys Knight.

Emily Wardill presents a compelling investigation into collective fear.

Game Keepers Without Game is the artist’s re-imagining of the 17th-century play Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño, 1635) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Set in contemporary London, Wardill’s meticulously constructed film tells the story of a schizophrenic young girl put up for adoption by her family at age eight. By the time she is a teenager, her father’s guilt leads him to devise a plan for her return home. Yet by this time the divide within the family is too great; the girl’s psychosis and destructive response to the objects and people around her leads to tragic consequences. Set to a hypnotic drumming soundtrack, which highlights the spatial construction of the film, the narrative unfolds with a refractive precision, juxtaposing inanimate objects with the play of multiple characters.

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.

How can we be objective about ourselves? Emily Wardill’s delicate narrative of interconnections explores the mysterious relationship of mind and body. Neuroscientist Dominique is treating Simon, who suffers from the loss of his proprioception – his sense of the relative position of his body parts. Her daughter Tony is a synchronised swimmer, perfectly in control of her own body as a way of running away from her mind. Dominique met her lover Hugo on a dating website. He claims to be a US spy. Is it a lie or his fantasy? From different perspectives, all these figures exemplify an interior alienation that distorts their cognition of their respective worlds.

“I am interested in this possibility, or responsability, of enacting your ideologies, and how that can happen in a way that’s fictitious. When you summon up material reality in your language, why does that always take on this fictitious dimension?” – EW.