Artist Emily Hartley-Skudder’s work is both seductive and humorous. Her work is typified by the use of miniatures and still life as her core subject matter. She works in a multi-disciplinary practice whereby she constructs and curates physical arrangements with found objects. These scenes, often domestic in nature, are then translated into photography, where with the artist’s careful observation and use of the tilt shift technique, these curious worlds become amplified into a new bright “reality”.
An obsession with the kitsch and the everyday comes to mind. Hartley-Skudder works in a variety of mediums including painting and sculpture, and stages them in installations, often above the kitchen sink or beside the bathtub. She states “My use of miniatures promotes the creation of the uncanny and subtly peculiar, the seemingly standard objects gradually separate from their initial reading”. It is the uncanniness of having images of the home, inside the home.
Painting is a step further into process, in which the clever and carefully rendered representations give us space for escapism, but also in a playful manner ask us to question the authentic and the “real”. Her work references the traditions of conventional still life painting, along with photorealism, commercial stock photography, cookbook illustrations and advertising imagery from both toy and real-life homeware catalogues.
Emily graduated from Ilam School of Fine Arts in 2012, and has exhibited widely since in New Zealand, including shows for the Christchurch Art Gallery, Whakatane Museum, Suite Gallery and the Auckland Art Fair, and overseas in selected shows in New York and Australia.