Finissage Sunday 26 October 2-5pm In conversation with Vanessa Jackson 3pm
Emma Tod’s paintings might be described as an antidote to the digital experience, giving us back a sense of what we scroll past: time. Yet her work also embraces its aesthetic, each painterly swatch a paean to high saturation and luminous intensity. Meticulously constructed from layer upon layer of oil paint, these works seem to hold fragments of time itself: glimpses rescued from the blur of capture, or resurrected at high zoom from digital anonymity.
As the exhibition title Shy Electron suggests, Tod’s practice negotiates not only the overwhelming speeds of image circulation but also the unseen signals, forces and fields that shape our world. Borrowed from Alice Fulton’s poem Cascade Experiment, the title evokes the elusive behaviour of matter and meaning:
“Because faith in fact can help create those facts,
the way electrons exist only when they’re measured,
or shy people stand alone at parties,
attract no one, then go home and feel more shy,
… we have to meet the universe halfway.”
Sourced from the internet, television, art history and fleeting everyday encounters, Tod’s visual fragments are recombined, erased and unsettled. Through this process, peripheral events are brought into focus while central narratives dissolve. The result is a landscape of ambiguous territories – half-recognised, half-imagined – where the edges of meaning remain open and unresolved.
This sense of entanglement runs throughout Tod’s practice, which draws on quantum physics and feminist theory to reimagine our relationship to images, time and the material world. The titles of the paintings offer further clues: scientific and ecological references – from the Ampullae of Lorenzini, electroreceptors used by fish to sense invisible fields, to atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements recorded on the day of completion – anchoring the works within broader networks of knowledge.
In the Shed Space, Tod’s video and sound installation, The Furies, invokes Greek mythology and the Erinyes – chthonic goddesses of vengeance and reckoning – whose voices rise from the margins of history. Here, as in the paintings, multiple temporalities overlap: past and future, myth and data, human and non-human, pointing to alternate ways of seeing and sensing.
By resisting the flat, instantaneous logic of the scroll, Tod creates a slower encounter: a space where images unfold rather than deliver, where attention lingers and where looking becomes an act of reorientation – towards uncertainty, multiplicity and possibility.
