Emily Speed: Littoral Zone
Emily Speed works with drawing, installation, film, performance and artists’ books to consider the relationship between the body and architecture. In previous works Speed has responded to particular buildings and sites; layering materials and creating spaces for herself, other performers and audiences. For this installation at Plymouth Arts Centre, Speed focuses on the littoral zone, the space between the high and low water mark, and again layers texture and images to divide physical and psychological space.
In thinking about proxemics and repetitive behaviour Speed began this piece of work by visiting the south Devon coastline. Observing beaches as a site of constant change and regeneration, she related this back to human efforts at building and creating territory; forming an idea for a filmed performance at South Milton Sands (also known as Thurlestone
Sands). Now edited, looped and integrated within the installation, multiple projections hint at the attempt, by a locally recruited group of volunteers, to build a temporary suburb. Battered by the wind and fighting with the customised and awkward windbreaks they hammer away in a Keaton-esque fashion to create a space of their own making. Equally impermanent, Speed has designed a structure comprised of a series of dividing walls for the gallery, creating liminal spaces that mirror those we see in the films. These walls never allow the viewer to be inside or outside, but always in-between.
Emily Speed has exhibited nationally and internationally and was shortlisted for the Northern
Art Prize in 2013. A member of the AIR council (Artists’ Interaction and Representation) and on the Board of Directors for a-n, Speed is also an active campaigner for fair artists’ fees and is a studio artist at the Royal Standard in Liverpool.
This exhibition has been sponsored by Gillespie Yunnie Architects.
Tuesday-Saturday 10am-8.30pm, Sunday 4pm-8.30pm, closed Mondays
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