Tatum Dooley on August 18, 2023
We were lucky enough to sit down with Emma Welch in her Toronto studio before her first solo exhibition, "Eyespots," at Hunt Gallery in Toronto, which took place in July 2023. We learned about her abstract paintings and the practice she calls "field psychedelia." You can listen to the full interview on Emma Welch's Peggy profile—keep reading for our favourite snippets from the talk. Click on any of the paintings to open the Peggy app and listen to the corresponding Pegcast.
On mimicry: It was really interesting to me that the fake flowers were mimicking a natural form, so pulling them apart and studying those forms, the various plant components were interesting. And then I was thinking a lot about mimicry and when I started to study the Mantis, it led me down a rabbit hole of researching mimesis and camouflage. I would study forms I was obsessed with, like the mantis, other orchids, and different plants and animals, and I would take bits and pieces from those forms and build my own new forms. If that makes sense, it’s a lot of layering and drawing to make my own new hybrid forms. I have this massive archive of hybrid abstract forms that I make.
On field psychedelia: To describe my practice as a whole, I've started to use a term called field psychedelia. It's part field research of plant, insect, and animal material, the drawings, the studying, and dismantling of that material to make new forms. And then the psychedelia component is how I build patterns and compositions and then the use of colour, because often they're optically quite challenging or just visually just a little bit more fatiguing. So for this body of work, I'm of course, still following that research, my overall practice.
On spiders: I was thinking a lot about tarantulas and how tarantulas produce offspring for this body of work. It informed how I made the compositions and also informed how I'm titling them. [In the painting] called brood, I was thinking a lot about things like eggs and tarantula eggs and when they developed mental stages. So when they start to have legs, and they start to hatch. Some people hate the subject matter, so it's understandable if it's not appealing.
Emma Welch is an artist residing in Toronto, Ontario. Her practice circulates around a process of production she calls field psychedelia. Her work has been recently shown at Project Underwing (Toronto), Hunt Gallery (Toronto), Galerie Nicolas Robert (Montreal), Erin Stump Projects (Toronto), Spacemaker ll (Toronto), and Egret Egress (Toronto). She is a co-founder and collective member of the plumb, an artist-run project space.
