something “absolutely crucial”
Emily Pope
Saturday 23rd November 2024 - Sunday 12th January 2025
I’ve been thinking alot about how art can work for me. Obviously, I’m dreaming, as it is clearly me who works for art. I’ve been asking myself, which dynamic is better? Who knows? Who really gives a shit. The world is on fire and we’re hurtling towards a crash. I look around: trees totally divorced from concrete, mind from body, state from society. The teaching faculty now understands the definition of education to be something entirely different to university management, who have redeveloped further study into a facet of the property market.
I’ve been yearning for something other than the above, and thinking about yearning in general - a common practice for dykes. I’ve had a long term fascination with films depicting ‘lesbian yearning’; scripts centring on working class women who are only ever merely friends, queer coded at best, typically road movies - and if it isn't strictly a road movie, the film begins or ends with a queer coded person behind the wheel. Road movies, populated by restless and frustrated characters who typically alter their perspective on their everyday lives through journeymaking, when blended with a warped version of feminism and often a male writer or director, produce a portrait of the pursuit of freedom, where the pursuit is characterised onscreen as nihilistic. The protagonists often meet an unfortunate end, or experience catastrophic events. Many of these titles came out of Hollywood between the 80’s and early 00’s and developed a cult lesbian following, and I devoured them as a closeted teen.
I want to make art exploring both my love of lesbian subgenres, and how cosplay and the working class fit together within this. A lot of the films I’ve researched, which seriously impacted how I experience desire, feature girls without a point of view essentially touring a middle class audience around ‘poor’ subjectivities. I’ve been thinking about this - sort of - class tourism, in all its forms - the obvious kind, rich masquerading as poor to enjoy all of the subcultural capital and none of the hardship, but also the holidays my friends went on as children and social media challenges on TikTok and YouTube where wealthy people go to a ‘normal’ supermarket with a set amount of money to see what they can get for it, and what I perceive to be one of the roots of this -: late nineties / early noughties TV programming where politicians or celebrities were challenged to do ‘a day in the life of’ and lived on a council estate, or went to prison as an ‘experience’.
Conversely, I've challenged myself to make a road movie. I want to know what this will feel like, considering that I can’t drive. I want art to work for me, I want to see my friends and I want to get in a car and go on holiday.
Emily Pope
2024
Emily Pope is an artist living and working in London. She works in film, sound, printmaking and writing. She is interested in series making, and has been making The Sitcom Show, a failed sitcom recording life under austerity measures in the UK, since 2016. Her research explores a history of experimental broadcast media with a focus on humour and satire, queer intersectional feminism, political rhetoric + class politics and she is excited by challenging dominant power structures.
Recent solo exhibitions include Poison Pen, Ginny on Frederick, London (2023), Nothing is Trite, Immaterial Salon, ART O RAMA, Marseilles (2022), Yank The Chain (With Ruth Angel Edwards), Wysing Broadcasts, Wysing Arts Centre (2022), Pen Pusher, V.O Curations, London (2021), The Sitcom Show - Series Finale, Peak Gallery, London (2019). Recent group exhibitions include True Stories, PAF, Olomouc, Czech Republic (2023), LOOK, LIGHTNING HAS STRUCK THE FLOWERS, Sundy, London (2022), Every Woman Biennial, Copeland Park Peckham, London (2022), Millenialism, Paradise Works, Manchester (2019), Fort Sumac, Enclave, Deptford (2019), Notes on Queerness, The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2018). Her writing has been published by Lesley Magazine, Curating the Contemporary, Laugh Magazine, Low Theory, The Freud Museum, Bookworks, Arcadia Missa, Montez Press and Autoitalia.
In 2023 Pope was selected as an awardee of the second edition of the LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award.