Artist Statement
Emma Butler is a senior at Brown University studying visual arts and French. She is from Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Emma started a company while at Brown, Intimately.co, which sells lingerie for women with disabilities. She believes everyone should have access to functional clothes that they can easily get on, but are also stylish. Her mission is to create a place where women with disabilities can feel beautiful and included. Apart from her business, her main passion is painting. Emma loves oils and watercololr and loves creating vignettes of everyday objects, playing with color and light. She is currently working on a series involving french pastries.
This show, "how i ended up at a little white church" is a series of paintings and mixed media done between 2016 and 2019 reflecting on the life and death of her friend. The pieces reflect in chronological order, the meeting between Emma and her friend, their friendship, their complexity of a relationship, her friend's death and finally Emma's grief. These works were not made in the order they appear, but were made at different stages in the grieving process as therapy and then later pieced together to create a timeline.
Emma creates most of her work in oils or watercolor, but in this show, the audience can see her use of mixed media in "Rosalie." The artist created a bust out of printed paper of obituaries and attached a skirt to the canvas made of fresh real flowers. In "Lee Highway Church" the viewer will notice the harshness of the strokes, much different than "Goodbye to the Priory." "Lee Highway Church" was painted with oil on canvas using only a palette knife. These works contrast greatly with the first pieces in the show and their softness.
Just as grief is a messing, non-linear, process that doesn't make sense at times, so is this show. The style of watercolors stray immensly from the last work, "Lee Highway Chuch." Not only is this show meant to clue the viewers in on a specific process of grief, but also represent pain and loss a whole.
There is no neat ending to "how I ended up at a little white church;" there is no "this will be all okay" piece to finish off the show. This alludes to a previous tragedy. If the viewer looks closely, they can see in "Rosalie" that there is in fact two different obituaries in the folded paper. You can see that "Lucas Miller Bandoni" died in August of 2016 and Rosie passed in April of 2017 (almost 3 years to the day of the opening of this show). The unsettling ending illustrates a personal anecdote of the artist, she feels always on edge wondering if she'll lose another friend to suicide, but also touches on a greater theme of uncertainty of when the next tragedy will hit in our lives. As we navigate the current pandemic and lose people close to us, we can all relate to this feeling of uncertainty and that tragedy could blow at us again at any moment.
This show can best be viewed by clicking on the first image to see the each piece with the title and description. Some images do not render fully otherwise.