Emma Bolland (they/them)

I describe my work as psychonautical. I practice across drawing, sculpture, installation, painting, text, performance, sound… I ask myself, what does the work need? I write across genres and disciplines, and have translated screenplays from French to English. I think about materiality, memory, magic, the sensory affect of institutional architecture, the emotions of site-specificity, interplanetary and stellar distance, and time. I value the metaphorical and metaphysical properties of the materials I use—I am currently working with metals and minerals associated with communication, distance, and magnetic pull such as magnetite, copper, and ground meteorites. I employ a sci-fi methodology, and take pleasure in the labour of my making and writing processes. I co-edit, (with Rachel Smith), the publishing project intergraphia.

I live with a chronic mental health condition and the aftermath of a spinal injury. I have lived experience of being institutionalised. My work is informed by my disabilities, but is never about them.