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London based artist Emma Hart (b.1974, London) makes sculpture, photography, film and installation. Her work is often badly-behaved and messy, challenging assumptions and stereotypes in her quest to make art to which everyone can relate. We were delighted that Emma accepted our invitation to make this, her first exhibition in Scotland, and responded with a series of entirely new work, which we showed alongside the major recent work Mamma Mia!, made as part of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women which she won in 2016.

The exhibition highlighted Hart’s work with ceramics, a material she turned to in order to find the ‘real’ in art: ‘clay can be an exciting way to talk about chaos … what is immediately important is how personal it is. There’s a very raw direct relationship between the clay and my hands’.

Mamma Mia! is an immersive, beguiling, engulfing installation. You look at it by walking through and around it, pushing your head up into a sequence of large ceramic heads/jugs/lamps which hang from the ceiling, projecting light in speech bubbles onto the floor. The work takes the family as a familiar context: the heads/jugs/lamps hang in family groups, disrupted by slowly moving fans whose blades are ceramic knives, forks and spoons. The newer works in the exhibition used the similarly common ground of the car and urban landscape to look at how we navigate the world and understand ourselves within it, with sculptures that place us and our families in relation to windscreens, road signs, car bonnets and steering wheels.

Download the Exhibition Guide

Download the Bulletin

Listen to Emma Hart: Artist’s Talk

Listen to Emma Hart in Conversation with Ali Smith

Listen to ‘Speed’: Discussion led by Ruth Bretherick

Images: Ruth Clark