Emily Webb
Star Flame Incandescent Bulb
6-14 June 2025
I do not trust lightbulbs that do not emit heat. I make my own icons and conserve in the negative. Dragging things around in the undergrowth, destroying things - In my day to day I clean historical dirt from a 12th century stone and at night I draw with soot and burn my panels. I pour oil onto things and reshape it. I conserve my own world. Almost a black body radiator, in this order: the light of stars, flames and incandescent bulbs. I think of crevices and their dirt, the sense of belonging that dirt might feel in a crevice. – Emily Webb
‘The whole surface of the Earth is one network of nerves,’ the 19th-century ribbon maker-turned-philosopher Charles Bray once wrote. ‘As in the human body, so in the body of the world, you can scarcely insert a needle into the point where there is no sentience. Life is always preserved at high pressure.’
And when any fragile container–the human body and the Earth included–reaches a high enough pressure, it is wont to burst. What would such an explosion look like, and what would be expelled? Emily Webb paints her way to a series of answers to these questions. She works with detritus: the kind of material that an over-stuffed planet (over-stuffed with art, with trash, with new and old byproducts of relentless human consumption) might ooze, or extrude, if one were to puncture it with a pin.
Her artistic practice is the antithesis of her current course of study in conservation of stone, wood and decorative surfaces. As Webb writes above, she spends her days removing the damaging marks of time from various treasures of art history and spends her nights burning and scrawling and–in effect–introducing those same processes of scarring to her own artwork. This is a precarious process that unfolds along a very thin line separating art and ruin.
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Emily Webb (b.1998) graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2021 and the Warburg Institute in 2022. She lives and works in London.
Emily treats painting as a process of training and tricking herself, the outcome forming a different whole from the pieces she cut up along the way.
Prices on Application. Please email sam@boldinggallery.com or esme@boldinggallery.com if interested.