EMMA ELIZABETH TILLMAN – DISCO BALL SOUL
2017-08-14Disco Ball Soul is the culmination of 10 years worth of memories. Consisting of personal photographs, diaries, and collages that combine the two; each piece is the obsessive record of a time and place in the artists life.
The collection started in 2007 in a hand built cottage in rural France. With no running water, no electricity and only a fireplace for heat, Tillman meticulously recorded her rocky experience of stealing potatoes and beet greens from the local fields, scavenging for firewood on the beach and trying desperately to maintain her relationship among the challenges of language, isolation, weather, and being flat broke. With each entry in her diary, Tillman was able to save the memory, to mark the passing of time and make sense of the unreliable thoughts that raced through her mind. By living each day twice, first through it’s experience and lastly by writing it down, Tillman was able to create a world that suited her more than the one outside her own mind. To shape its corners, to fill the pages of her diary with her life Tillman allows herself to experience the color of it again and again and again. She is an island unto herself and the people and places that exist with and around her are elevated to mythic status, imbued with mystery and considered in all their complexity. Her photography accomplishes this same intention. It was on this trip that a renewed interest in photography was sparked. After having learned to work in the dark room at age 14, Tillman had lost the passion for taking and printing photographs by the time she entered college. She focused instead on her writing. But when her boyfriend gave her his grandmother’s Pentax camera for her 21st birthday, her interest was revived. Among the early subjects of this revival was the magnificent desolation of the Arizona desert and Rick, the boyfriend who lived there in a crumbling adobe.
Opposite – At home in the Hollywood Hills, May 2016
Exhibition runs through to August 29th, 2017
Gallery 46
46 Ashfield St
London
E1 2AJ
