Cry Me a River - Emma Elliott's Solo Show at the Muse Gallery

Cry Me a River, Emma Elliott

The Muse Gallery

Private View: Thursday 2nd of November, 18:00-21:00

‘Cry Me a River’ is a solo exhibition by Emma Elliott about heartbreak, that weaves together the emotional threads of love’s labour’s lost. The center piece is an oversized human heart marble sculpture that Elliott carved as a personal challenge after separating from a significant relationship and navigating the rollercoaster of a new one. From this carrara marble heart a series of miniature slip cast stoneware versions evolved, dubbed the ‘Don’t Ask’ series. Each delicate heart was shattered and repaired using a modern interpretation of the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi; where broken pottery is carefully restored using gold - a symbolic representation of fracture and healing. The shattering of the hearts is recorded on film, in painstaking slow motion, echoing the fragility of the human condition. Elliott invites you in to sit on the sob sofa and rock it out to your favourite tunes.

Emma Elliott is an associate Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors whose central themes look at the back-and-forth between enlightened advancements in human evolution and devolution into animalistic behaviour. For Elliott, art is a way of exploring that which is instinctive and that which is learnt. Working primarily across sculpture, she explores relationships between the refined and the primitive and the physical and the spiritual; examining the human condition from up close and from afar, honing in on minute anatomical details and broadly surveying the influences of our collective past on present behaviour, often in the same piece.

Elliott’s work hangs in the balance between the classic and the contemporary, the devastating and the ridiculous. She believes art has a duty to wrestle with society and its elements of rigidity. Elliott has exhibited widely, including Political Art, U-jazdowski Museum of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, 2021/22, Wander_Land, The Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Penzance, 2023, The Summer Exhibition, Royal Society of Sculptors, 2023, The Unlit PathThe Hardwick Gallery 2022. Elliott has won awards with The Chiaya Art Award, 2021: The Sunny Art Prize 2019, Passion for Freedom 2015 and Winter Pride 2014.