MYTHOLOGIES: Emma Windsor Liscombe at One New Change
Emma Windsor Liscombe’s paintings illustrate a personal mythology. Which is why she operates in portraiture, her subjects inspired by people known or unknown, depicting them in a moment of time that foretells the future through the accumulation of the past. This temporal uncertainty comes across in the delicate rendering of the faces, shifting and morphing as if in an altering memory.
Here is what Emma has to say about her Bloom cycle of paintings...
"The works included in the The Bloom Cycle are the result of a body of work aiming to explore the creation of a contemporary mythology based on female story and experience.
The Bloom Cycle is a contemporary mythology that I created during my time at the RCA. It explores the themes of trauma, addiction, and nostalgia through the lives of women, known and unknown to me, and their interlinking narratives. It is a ‘cycle’, because I believe these states can place an individual, their bodies, and their descendants in a cyclical pattern of experience.
The importance of documenting these stories in relation to these themes is to establish a contemporary mythology that is understanding of forms of trauma, addiction, and how nostalgia runs in parallel as a bittersweet desire, particularly from a female perspective. The composition of each image strives to emulate sense of the nostalgic longing to return to a specific past, place, or apparently better, easier, pre-trauma and or pre-addicted moment. Each scene appears calm, peaceful, perhaps very normal: yet an underlying emotion and energy occurs, emerging throughout the mask-like layers of applied paint. The layered nature of life experience becomes a painted mask that can reveal or conceal story, according to the viewer.
The title Bloom refers to the cyclical nature of addiction, trauma, and nostalgia. Emotional, physical experiences that can be said to occur as a constant state of bloom: one never fully returns, as nostalgia beckons. Yet one never really leaves, quits, heals. Indeed, the state of trauma arguably maintains one part of the self at a certain age, place: whether healing does or does not occur, memory- and new understanding resulting from trauma- holds a part of an individual always in a moment, either physically, emotionally, or both. Like the paintings, one lives a narrative comprised of many layers, yet exists within apparently placid, wholesome spaces. One moves forward, perhaps with greater strength yet, a stasis of eternal bloom or, the nostalgia felt, brings a longing to return, and inner self that exists to re-live and re-create memory and narrative."
