Manchester
School of Art
MA Show
2013
Fri 27 September —
Sun 13 October
10.00—16.00hrs
An exhibition of work
by postgraduate
students of —
- Architecture & Urbanism
- Art As Environment
- Design
- Design & Art Direction
- Filmmaking
- Fine Art
- Landscape Architecture
- Media Arts
- Photography
- Textiles
- Three Dimensional Design
- Visual Culture
Emma Blackburn
Emma Blackburn's work aims to encourage people to think differently about fragmented, 'dead' and hidden objects and their connection with the past. She is particularly interested in how curators interpret, conserve and present historic textiles. As such, the majority of her artwork has responded to specific places including country houses, museums and galleries and their collections and archives.
Historic research plays an important part in informing Blackburn's practice. She has studied banner conservation at the Peoples History Museum where she explored how support fabrics are used to create visual infill, structural stability and aid interpretation of damaged textiles. This research generated large-scale ideas and explorations using traditional textile methods including hand embroidery, dye and screen-print. For Blackburn's final MA piece: Red Tunic (2013), she was commissioned to respond to the Ancient Egyptian textile collection at the Whitworth Art Gallery. Here, she re-interpreted a child's garment to reflect the fragile relationship between life and death, or more specifically for this commission, the 'life' in cloth, attempting to re-connect a fragment with its past. Intervention with museums and their audiences is considered to be a significant element of Blackburn's work and its development in the future.
