Emma Wootton is a multidisciplinary artist who predominantly works with sculptural installations and wearable sculpture. Wootton’s installations take the shape of whimsical alternative realities that soften and give form to faceless fears.
Wootton’s current practice is concerned with anxiety and paranoia, particularly its intersection with climate change. Her work aims to express her feelings of powerlessness and loss, through the use of monstrous imagery and references to a dystopia. By creating sculptures that are the hybridised forms of animals, and machines, her imagined creatures symbolise a state of being both victims, and creators of destruction. Her work aims to invoke the fear of the unnatural, the out of place, and uncanny, yet also the beauty of both natural and manmade forms.
The materiality of Wootton’s work, using soft sculpture, plays into her conceptual thinking around power dynamics. She uses fabric to render objects symbolic of destruction as soft and delicate. Throughout her work, Wootton, explores the versatility of fabric as a sculptural medium as well as its symbolic qualities of fragility. For her monochrome colour schemes, Wootton draws inspiration from coral bleaching, where creatures are in a position of extreme precariousness, but not yet dead. This palette also emphasises an impression of ghostliness, of something insubstantial and imagined.
