Emily Humphries

Floating Blossoms-from Ecstasy: In and Out of the Sublime.

Emily Humphries' Ecstasy: In and Out of the Sublime, encompasses works of a complexity critic Luciano Ponzio has written about in these terms:  

" Humphries’ signs refuse to lie on the canvas and her paintings are kept clear of the symbolic, of the indexical that could obstruct them and block them. It is to be said also that in Humphries’ paintings there are white regions within which the flux of signifiers intersect in the void of silence, in waiting for the word other, in the suspension of semantic texture. Just like white in painting, the musical“artext “4’33”, “Silence”that John Cage conjectures to listening is the proof of the feasibility of a musical piece literally inaudible , especially because it proposes what generally one is not disposed towards, for distraction, for lack of time, for prejudice, for presumption, in other words the listening to silence. Usually silence is not considered as deserving listening to. Silence here is presented not as void of sounds but as becoming itself unrepeatable enunciation in the form of “hushing” and as such only perceived in the world of word, in the human world, only by man, by the one who is capable of listening not only of hearing ( Michael Bachtin discerns between “silence” and “ hushing up”). In that sense the “artext” is seen a permanent revolution" . ( Luciano Ponzio, The universe of drawings draws; in Catalogue of Works, 2010).

Emily Humphries writes: "Floating Blossoms, show oriental flowers moving across the canvas with the linen being naked, breaking through the applied image like a Haiku poem sits obviously in form but pared back in this instance to the beauty and sublimation of the Other. My use of pencil in these works is again to suggest a process, a flux and movement or something sought and worked towards." ( E.Humphries, My idea from the outset. in Catalogue of Works, 2010)