Troy Emery

In Artist Profile 55, Troy Emery spoke with Nikita Holcombe about his uncanny creatures, and the ways in which they confound the dichotomies of art and craft, and human and animal.

Troy Emery’s practice is imbued with tactility that points to the role of animals and their forced complicity within contemporary life. Situating the works within the murky juncture of art and craft, Emery plays with colour, texture and material to create life-like animalistic figures.

Emery’s life-size sculptures of animal forms include the usual domesticated subjects of dogs and cats but are also joined by ones that were considered ‘wild’ such as sloths, lions and foxes. The sculptures are often presented in bright colours, seen in the vibrant pink galapagos pink land iguana, 2020, and assume postures that are unsettlingly familiar, as if they could shift and breathe life at any moment. These forms however are composed of intricately placed layers and layers of textile, not flesh and blood. They remain faceless, a hint to their agency stripped through anthropocentric destruction and possession. When exhibited, the figures often spill over the plinth, breaking the barrier between art and audience, man-made and natural. 

Emery’s two-dimensional works echo similar sentiments to his sculptures, however, possess a more playful air. Nikita Holcombe spoke with Emery about his process and practice. 

Can you tell me a bit about your creative process and how you construct your sculptural works?

My creative process starts with hoarding materials; there’s a rough sketch of what I want to make but it’s largely directed by what fabrics and shapes I can get my hands on. I work primarily with textiles in the form of colourful polyester tassels. In the studio, I’m combining these materials with animal forms, a kind of pelt, where the fabric creates a textile mass over the animal. I start with a mannequin similar to that used in taxidermy. The end result is still an animal shape but more abstracted from what I started with. There are many metres of fabric pinned and glued over the underlying form.

Do you employ a similar process for drawing and painting? 

Yes, in a way. With painting I’m attracted to the tactile properties of paints. I only use a pallet knife so its very much about manipulating a colourful three-dimensional substance. This is very similar to what I enjoy about working with textiles. And in terms of imagery within my paintings, like the sculptures, its mostly simple decorative motifs; animals and crafts. My sculptures and paintings don’t quite mirror each other but there is a very similar approach. My paintings are a bit silly. They are more ideas of artworks I might imagine in a museum or home, a cartoon of a particular aesthetic, rather than an exercise in studying or faithfully representing their subject matter. 

Your work interrogates the murky space between art and craft. What is your relationship with each of these categories, and how do they converge in your practice?

I’ve always had anxiety about what was art and what was ‘not art’ because it was craft. Some people take craft very seriously, so I suppose I should specify that when I use the word craft, I’m referring to a very uncool suburban notion of craft. A type of object that is almost anti-art; the aesthetics of the CWA fundraiser stall, or the two-dollar-shop ceramic ornament come to mind. I think it very much comes from growing up in non-art family in rural Queensland. My grandfather had a multi-tiered display of garden gnomes and my mother’s house is full of chintzy decorative animal ornaments. 

You make reference to the importance of animals and that domestic animals are a ‘token of ecological ruination.’ Can you speak a bit more to that? 

It’s more that endangered animals in zoos and taxidermy animals with the natural history museum setting are tokens of ecological ruination. Their very display is often a lesson in their own demise. Thinking of animals as symbols of the natural world, domestic animals can be read in a similar way. The animal body removed from the context of nature, the wild world being brought inside, is an analogy for the natural world being somehow diminished. 

Your sculptural works are often brightly coloured and possess a distinctly animalistic posture. Is it important that the works are presented in a specific way to enhance this impression? The animalistic nature of the forms also seem to be unsettled by the use of craft-like aesthetic techniques.

The core structure of the work is an anatomically correct to scale animal model. So, the sculptures are, underneath, distinct animals like lions, foxes, and big cats. Through the process of building the colourful textile pelt, that very particular animal disappears and transforms into something less recognisable but still recognisably animal-like. The works become new hybrid animals with a new shape and coat.

If you look at taxidermy, there is some discomfort there if you ponder that it’s an actual deceased animal. In my work, there is no real animal component because I have swapped out the fur and leather pelt for the highly artificial colourful polyester tassels. I think the discomfort and awkwardness of what you feel with taxidermy is able to translate across to the garish materials over the form.

You have been commissioned by Melbourne Fashion Week and Hermes –  can you tell me a bit about the process and the dialogue between your artworks and fashion?

Working with textiles, there is of course some harmony between my sculpture and fashion. I have collaborated with Hermes Australia several times, exhibiting in their stores. It’s great to reach different audiences and experiment with seeing the work in different contexts. Before I went to art school, I dropped out of fashion school. I think there are some interesting crossovers between art and fashion.

Where you in Melbourne during the lockdowns? If so, how did that experience impact your work?

I have a small studio in Brunswick, Melbourne. Very fortunately I was able to continue my studio practice throughout the lockdown. Luckily Sydney was in lockdown to a lesser extent than Melbourne and I was able to exhibit works at Martin Browne Contemporary, although I was unable to attend in person. I did have many projects and opportunities delayed or outright cancelled. I was supposed to spend three months on an artist residency in Shanghai, but that project seems like it’s indefinitely suspended.

The vibrant, tactile forms and depictions by Troy point to a not only a relationship between animals and humans, but domestic pets and the domesticity of craft work. Each are ‘of the home’ and therefore are traditionally considered to be tamed and subdued. This assimilation into the home is compounded through by the ‘unnatural’ iridescent colour palette and synthetic materials of which they are materialised. The adoption of these man-made materials and hues on animal forms that belong beyond the home points to the grander notion of domestication and ownership over animals, rendering the line between the human and ‘wild’ home invisible.

This essay was originally published in Artist Profile, Issue 55, 2021.

EXHIBITION
Troy Emery
Martine Browne Contemporary, Sydney