Fear And Looming In Compton With The Work Of Emma Talbot

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Fear And Looming In Compton With The Work Of Emma Talbot

11/7/2025

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‘Personal’ … The Tragedies by Emma Talbot. Photograph Courtesy the artist (The Guardian)

It’s open until the 5th of October, so you’ve plenty of time to get yourself down to How We Learn To Love. The latest Emma Talbot exhibition is at Compton Verney in Warwickshire. (It’s pronounced Warrick). She’s recently completed a residency in Italy, which she received after winning the Max Mara Prize in 2019. Now living between Emilia and the UK, Emma Talbot is exploring silk paintings with a Medean twist. She wants to portray the Greek mother Medea who killed her sons and draw comparisons to people who send soldiers to war. If a mother sends her sons to war, is she any different to Medea? Is certain death and risk of death the same thing? What if you know your sons will be doing the killing. How do you feel about that?

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Utilising the flowing and lustrous quality of silk, Emma Talbot paints her images in vivid colour with beautifully designed details. Uncovering the mental anguish and existential dread that grows from thoughts of war, terror, death, and pain, the weeping and screaming of those left behind can only represent the narrative of the beaten. What a tragedy. When the UK Government is considering conscription to boost its military strength, do they realise what effect this will have on the way parents up and down the country will feel about them? I don’t think they do. It’s a good job we can vote every five years.

What Emma Talbot is asking for, is perhaps a world where aggression and killing isn’t accepted anywhere. Maybe the only reason we use it ourselves it because others are already on that platform. Look at Tibet, the pacifist nation under occupation. The notion of putting your life on the line to protect something you value is not uncommon, getting used to the idea of death is the first step. In a self-centred society where the individual is marketed for and praised, who can blame anyone for never looking in that direction? These people who come from places where life is not so certain and where negative emotions compound over generations, how do we deal with the inevitable outcome?

It’s not that Talbot is war obsessed, she is an emotional creator who delves deep into her own inner landscape with thoughts and feelings manifesting in her art. It’s not just silk, either, she works on animation and sculpture as well as painting in various forms. The reach of her vision stretches into pain points and difficulties that touch most modern folk and probably played a role in the distant past, too. The collection called Magical Thinking looks at how we tell stories about the facts we encounter in the world and turn our lives into a semi fairytale by embellishing on the cues. Like a little game, it can have rules and agendas that completely step out of the real world. Putting away the childish things requires us to recognise them, and perhaps this work helps us to do just that.

Don’t forget, you can get to see Emma Talbot’s work, How We Learn To Love at Warwickshire’s Compton Varney until the 5th of October.

Via The Guardian

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