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Zinc blue stretch, aquamarine dream. How is it I can spin and be entirely still? My hands and each mark score arduously against the metal, warming my palm. Lifting weight though swimming lightly. A human imagination.
The brushing sound in a bizarre arrangement. The roof floats above without knowing. Consciously arranged, slowly pouring away, rip and hit, whirred. The personality of a handle. Only the new leaves move with the breeze when meeting. Sun-bleached floral bedsheet blind. Heat-treated to harden the steel. Wedges in wood. Shock-resistant grip impressions snap and gliding scraper. Playful assertion fits its way through remnants of my wrist and mind. A house painter as she descends a ladder. Forged domesticity and awakening.
Persisting anyway, big brush glide and scuff. The complication sits as I please and the saws see each other, standing upright. I’ve made something that looks back at me. Thought as drawing edge and ridges, organic synthetic manufactured freeform. Softness and shadow reflecting itself, the edge. Blades and armour, symmetrical swathe.
Blue-edged growth. My idea and the time bent into line, off-balance. The answer weaves itself in like some cryptic relative. The noise, hit, silence in the garden. Daylight shifting peach, scrape and glide. Sculpted hammer head. Anthropomorphic inkling. Fallen leaves suspend like a mosaiced path in my mind, holding hands with a solution. Daylight reveals a courtyard, its hedges below knee height.
Hit, knock with intention. Rhythm and light reveal themselves to me, alive and vibrant, reflecting. The form and its buzz are indistinguishable. Knotted trunk. Tools that extend my hand. The road beside me is coral in colour. Painting life as growing and changing shapes, active force. Unabashed cherry red, summer storm sky grey. Phthalo.
Mimicking contours tell their own fibs. Twigs extend and contract. Each movement is a sound recorded and becomes lines and marks in paint. She’s thinking through line. What is there holds the same strength as the thing that frames it, then holds up my thought. Presenting something upright then diverting it. A path, a trunk, a nail. Scoring a saw blade, metal sheen, bumpy bark. The paintings are the process, the rhyme, and a solution. Handled potential, handheld labour. A painting’s edges restrained, erased and delicate concrete glass. Life, immediacy, and a rose garden. Undoing in scrape and undone brush scuff. An emotional climate towards a subconscious telling.
—Madeline Simm, September 2022
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Works
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Emily FerrettiStray Staples, 2022Oil on linen51 x 40 cm
20 x 16 in -
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Download Artist's CVDerived from collected images, memory and the imagination, Emily Ferretti’s paintings captivate in their playful simplicity. Joyful, humorous and honest paintings, they manifest a sensibility which one might describe as ‘quiet camp’.Rendered in a fresh, bright palette, in brushstrokes equally clear and confident, they are considered and iterative rather than hasty and aggressive. They meditate on a defined set of subjects and scenes; they move through spaces imagined, yet ones that are never far from the artist’s everyday: trees and parkways, domestic settings, the workshop and studio. Brushstrokes flow across the paintings’ surfaces, never seeming abrupt and certainly not angry, even when they so show something altogether spikey, and quite possibly violent (i.e. the spinning blade of a circular saw). And such marks have an almost onomatopoeic quality to them—representing not only the ‘thing’ but also their movement, how they occupy space and time, and quite possibly their aura, their energy.Attuned to contemporary practice, Ferretti’s paintings engage with a history of picture making across genre and tradition. Influences of folk art and early modernist painting being clear to see (unashamedly so). Her work extends these artistic traditions, and through doing so makes her own indelible mark.Emily Ferretti (Born 1982, Naarm/Melbourne) currently lives and works in Naarm. Over the past fifteen years she has undertaken a dedicated full-time studio practice. During this time her work has been widely exhibited, in exhibitions across Australia, North America and Europe. She has undertaken studio residences including Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, Cite de Arts International, Paris, and Green Street, New York. Her work is held in numerous public collections across Australia, and numeous private collections internationally.
Emily Ferretti: Hitting the Nail
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