Group Exhibition
Solstice Arts
Navan, Ireland
2024
We Speak Through Worlds
Thresholds to the Unseen Exhibition Text
Emily Waszak’s powerful sculptural installation We Speak Through Worlds, 2023 is a threshold to the unseen. The installation consists of a large woven threshold made from textile waste or ruin, which is reworked in service to ritual, a tea bowl made of wild Irish clay and a brass plate etched by seaweed from the Irish sea. The installation functions as a butsudan (Buddist altar) informed by Japanese culture. Bodies, Jōmon, Time, 2021-2023 is an assemblage of ritual objects which holds time and the gesture of sacred acts. Shimenawa (sacred ropes) delineate the sacred from the profane. Ceramic vessels, marked by the same cord used by the prehistoric Jōmon people of Japan, in a nod to the artist’s ancestors, hold offerings. Terracotta sculptures slowly drip saline into unfired bowls made of wild clay, eventually returning them to their muddy origins. The pieces are made of materials disused and forgotten. Industrial waste from a factory, wild clay collected from the Irish landscape and unused medical supplies of a dead husband are all instrumentalised in service of this immersive, ritualised assemblage full of sorrow and love.