Aberdeen Art Gallery:The Diamond (Descartes Daughter) - Emily Wardill

'In Conversation' with Emily Wardill: Wednesday 3 November, 13.00

In 2009, through our new Acquisition Scheme, the Contemporary Art Society bought a new work by Emily Wardill for the collection at Aberdeen Art Gallery. The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter) enters this rich historical and modern collection and adds to the growing group of contemporary works that the gallery are acquiring. The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter) will open to the public on the 30 October, 2010 and will be the first time that it has been shown as part of the collection at Aberdeen.

On the 3 November to mark this occasion Emily Wardill has been invited by Aberdeen Art Gallery and as part of our Centenary Programme, to do a lunch time ‘In Conversation’. She will talk about her practice and this work in particular.

In this experimental film work Wardill creates a prismatic theatre of luminous images and fragmented texts. There is a narrative of sorts: the recounting of an apocryphal anecdote relating to the famous French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650), taking the mythical story of the death of Descartes' daughter as a starting point to search for her again without the anchor of rational thought. The words are delivered in a mechanical sounding Swedish accent and seem to shatter like a crystal refracting light - the text breaks: sentence fragments are repeated, amended, the voice skipping as though trying to jump a programming error.
This disconcerting narrative runs alongside a visual play - in a thick black visual field where a diamond is protected by lasers, images appear of a girl playing on a Nintendo Wii. She wears a leotard marked with tape - a homemade version of the costume that Eitienne Jules Marey would dress his subjects in when conducting Chromophotography, an early form of experimental photography that captured the motion of its subjects, and is considered to be the precursor to cinematography. Meanwhile, multidirectional glints off the titular diamond produce solid bars of white light against the total ink-black darkness. The film has been described as ‘lithe’ and ‘dazzling’ and certainly it has a resonance that should stay with those who enter its space long after they leave the gallery.

We would like to thank Aberdeen Art Gallery and Grays School of Art for their involvement in this project.

Emily Wardill (b.UK, 1977) is a London-based artist filmmaker and Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art. She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including solo projects at de Appel, Amsterdam, The Showroom, London (2009) the ICA, London (2008), Fortescue Avenue / Jonathan Viner, London (2005, 2006), STANDARD (OSLO) (2008) and the performance event “The Feast Against Nature”, at PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York (2004). She has shown at Tate Britain, Film Festival Oberhausen, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Witte de With, the London and New York Film Festival, MOCA Miami, She recently won the Jarman Award and has been shortlisted for The Future Generation Art Prize. Later this year she will be showing at The British Art Show 7 and MIT List.
She has recently produced a publication with the writer Ian White, ‘We are behind’ that accompanies the exhibition at de Appel, published by de Appel arts centre and Book Works, London.