The Complex presents a solo exhibition by Emma Roche in the Ground Floor Gallery. The exhibition is the fifth and final in The Complex’s 2021 Visual Arts Programme entitled “Nature echoes Reality, Artifice echoes Fiction'' in which artists are invited to consider the Gallery’s architecture as part of their process.
Emma Roche creates a site specific exhibition reflecting enquiries into labour, employment and motherhood. Roche’s paintings combine methodologies of knitting or tapestry with painting to form layered and textured works. The artist explores 'everyday' ideas in these paintings which are made using long lines of dried paint employed like wool or thread. Ideas concerning how we structure and organise time are highlighted through these paintings as the labour involved in their production is apparent.
A newly commissioned text by Rebecca Fortnum accompanies the exhibition ‘Hannah and her Sisters: loss of face in the paintings of Emma Roche’, November 2021. The full text available here
The title for the show Spiders and Cheerleaders was influenced by writer and art critic James Merrigan's [deleted] Instagram post of Diego Velázquez's painting Las Hilanderas (“The Spinners”), 1655:
Emma Roche lives and works in Wexford. She is the 2021 recipient of the Emergence Award, Wexford Arts Centre; Visual Arts, Arts Council Bursary Award, 2021 and 2020, Creative Ireland Bursary Award, 2020 and is shortlisted for the Zurich Portrait Prize, National Gallery, Dublin, 2021. Recent exhibitions include Ochre, two-person show with Ciara Roche at Wexford Arts Centre, 2021, Forward Slash at the LAB Gallery Dublin, 2018 Selected group shows include Small Night Zine, Catalyst Arts, Belfast and Garter Lane, Waterford, 2022, VISUAL Carlow, 2020 and 2019, Turps Gallery, London, 2018 and Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, 2018.
Image courtesy of the artist
