Collection Study

Emma Talbot, How the Web was Woven, 2009

Heather Phillipson’s The Creeps is written in response to Emma Talbot’s How the Web was Woven (2009), an acrylic on canvas work with a variety of vignettes, spider webs, texts and mysterious figures. Reflecting the haunting, unsettling atmosphere in Talbot’s painting, Phillipson considers how an artwork can never be fully understood or described, but is something we can continually think with and learn from.

Text by Heather Phillipson

THE CREEPS

How the Web Was Woven strikes me as a painting in the throes of affliction. I say ‘painting’, but this isn’t one painting. It’s at least thirteen. And though these paintings arrive as a sequence of scenes, summoning the graphic novel, they can’t be broken into single or even sequential events. The painting holds moments — leftover or unlived moments, either way undigested. They are prophetic, itchy moments, and there’s a snapshot for every one, like a memory or a premonition, making the painting prickle with stories, hoarded and vented. They stop and start. They might go on forever. Let’s not forget, the whole thing here is webs, so it’s hard not to read each depicted moment as something snagged, and left hanging.

OK, I’ve only ever seen the painting via jpeg, video link and screenshot, but its torment is palpable. (Misogynistic undertones are never undertones, unless you’re a misogynist.) Emma Talbot has that gift of dredging up insidious sociological narratives and mapping them back to your conscience, captivatingly. Even via a screen, it penetrates. It uploads an atmosphere to the psyche. It’s as if she’s saying: make no mistake about the real contagions, the disquiets injected daily.

Inside the painting’s heavy, delineating lines, a quickly engineered set of associations begins to build as buildings are built, with rooms. Rooms populated with HEADS. Before almost anything else, I see HEADS — swollen, faceless heads, each one somewhere between a phallus-bulb and an omphalos. Are these all one woman? Are all men the same? Would you like one bad lover or several? The volume of sexual poses suggests multiplicity, in opposition to complicity — shape-shifting means playing the game while dodging it, fooling the onlooker, because aren’t these demarcating lines not only webs becoming bars becoming mesh becoming peep-holes becoming glory-holes, nets, hairs, ropes, bondage, ripped tights, sealed with varnish, but also, perhaps, exits?

In a way, this is a painting as a list. I’m reminded of the phrase, ‘finding love on the web’, a promise towards an unknown fate if ever there were one, so it’s also useful to cling tight to some of the potential consequences of that promise which, one way or another, never fails to take its toll. The disquiet this work evokes in me is exactly in response to this — that everyone, real or invented, deserves life’s cracks wide open, but these characters are entangled in their moments and will replay them on a loop, listing out the ways people blaze, in perpetuity. Perhaps what Emma Talbot tells us — what all paintings tell us — is that painting is a kind of purgatory, that every painting is a web in which some thing is captive, and keeps jolting.

Mainly what I feel looking at this painting is the creeps. As in ‘it gives me the creeps’ and ‘the guys are all creeps’ and ‘it creeps’ and ‘it creeps’, as in it’s itchy and the characters are shady and it moves with stealth, and also it contains a deadly sense of deformation under stress.

No spiders were handled in the making of this painting. There’s not a spider to be seen, in case you hadn’t noticed (you might well not notice, because the spider is omnipresent and even the man’s hands are arachnid). There’s nothing funny about it and yet it suggests the comic when you consider that perhaps the whole painting is leftovers, after the spider has spun and encased and eaten and upped and left. Perhaps what’s left of the spider is her rejects, or her deferred gratification, or some basic spidery facts - that their name, in English, comes from spithra from spin from the old English spinnan — to draw out and twist, just as the artist does — and that the weavers that bind and trap the prey (dinner) tend to be the female spiders, so who’s going to get the last laugh, and supper?

Perhaps Emma Talbot’s supreme accomplishment is her tone. Her gestures get to the point while avoiding it. They suggest mortal danger while scribbling violently over it. Now the measured line vexes itself, there’s iron in it. It begins to record the slights and humiliations and back- and front-stabbings that continually push minds to the limits of endurance. All over the surface there are thoughts moving and crossed out and underlined, written and drawn, like a school exercise book or something, like, above all else, by looking, we are learning. What it is we’re seeing and learning is, foremost, the knowledge of the painting itself, a knowledge with the emotional taxation of a violent news cycle, which, let’s face it, is all news cycles. Even the lines are in survival mode. There’s no doubt that the artist’s body — like the spider’s body — has been in the arena. After the fact, what’s left is the lines’ toil.

In fact, let’s call it a documentary — the painting as evidence, as this actually happened. Emma Talbot is manifesting the trouble that preceded her marks and that’s in her marks and is her marks. She is not a storyteller, the opposite — she is telling us not to make a story out of this. Life is not made out of stories, even though we try to make it so. It’s made out of emotional burns, scratches and swellings. The painting is the inconclusive telling of its own construction.

In this respect, Emma Talbot’s work strikes me as doing the work, primarily, of relationships, which is one reason her paintings and drawings are so accurately complex. A conflicted fever inhabits the surface. The painted lines are forceful and willful but also sometimes meandering and elsewhere-seeking. Her paintings are made of push and pull, they happen in-between, they’re interior­-scapes, not the external world, though she’s thinking intensely about it.

Could anything be more lifelike than pictures that combine accessibility to experience with a highly fragile privacy? Than finding a form that accommodates the uncultivated and inhospitable?

I wonder if Emma Talbot would consider that, like the spider, she’s taking hold of living things and making a meal of them. She’s setting us up for her tremendous force to take a nice big mouthful out of us.