“I walk a lot in Hackney, and on my walks I tend to pick up discarded things”, Hackney-based collage artist Emily Tracy tells East End Review.
“Bits of old wood, or these fantastic edges of a dressing table mirror, I’m turning that into something”.
Tracy is currently preparing for Slip Stream, her upcoming exhibition at the Wilton Way Gallery beginning on 16 April.
The pieces will incorporate “found materials” including “vintage print media, discarded wood, and street-collected objects”.
Tracy’s work tells the story of the interwoven relationship between human action and the natural world.
Her collage process involves “cutting away images, captions, and text” from print media “to reveal hidden structures such as staple holes, gutters, bleed lines, and CMYK [Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (Black)] registration marks” as well as using things she finds while out and about.
“These acts of deconstruction form the foundation of a collage practice that is as much about what is missing as what remains”, she continues.
“By disrupting conventional relationships between image and caption, text and context, the pieces invite new and unexpected narratives to emerge”.
Tracy says she is particularly fond of working with old geographic magazines.
“They’re kind of old-fashioned now. I particularly love the issues from the 1970s, because the colours are really beautiful and they look at lots of different environments and places around the world”, she adds.
“I take the magazines apart, and when you do that you see the centrefold and where the staple marks were and you get kind of pairings of images which weren’t intended to be paired together”.
Tracy has worked full-time as an artist in Hackney since the 1990s. In addition to the exhibition, she has recently organised a series of creative workshops running up until the end of March.
Social engagement is key to the artist’s work - she also plans to run collage-making events for residents local to the area while the exhibition is on.
Slip Stream differs from her previous work, however. “I’ve spent most of my career doing socially engaged work, so I’ve made installations in different communities for festivals and museums working with different people”, she explains.
“I haven’t exhibited in conventional galleries [very much].”
Wilton Way Gallery is housed in a former Victorian shop known as LH Brown’s. Until 2007, it operated as a shoe shop. “Which is what attracted me to it”, she adds.
“The gallery uses the shop window and the basement below accessed by a tiny staircase.
“The streets around London Fields were laid out along former field boundaries, footpaths and cartways. The geology below our feet tells an ancient history of rivers, seas and lost environments”.
Slip Stream by Emily Tracy
Wilton Way Gallery, E8 1BG.
16 April-12 May. Free entry.
