The tacit, the implied and the felt:
relinquishing control to ambiguous, intuitive and experiential ways of knowing.
Excessive control over outcome-driven processes and high standards of perfectionism can often feel oppressive, limiting, and restrictive, trapping the artist within the constraints of efficiency, success and achievement. This practice-led research serves as a personal act of resistance, where I allow undetermined possibilities to reveal themselves through acts of experimental making, emphasising intuition, embodying uncertainty and embracing unpredictability. This aims to explore the value of sensory and implicit understandings developed through interactions between the inner self and one’s surroundings, where direct experience leads to a type of knowledge that rational and intellectual reasoning cannot fully grasp.
This research utilises experimental methods and intuitive material-led exploration to create durational and spatial installations that facilitate experiential encounters. Investigations into light and its absence, translucency and opacity, motion and stillness, arise from playful intersections between automatic drawing, tulle and water-soluble fabric, as well as projection and the moving image, space and sound. These installations serve as spaces for experiential knowing, where sensory engagement, relational interactions and affective atmospheres shape the audience’s encounter with the work.
In both the processes of making and the audience’s embodied encounter, this research aims to challenge limiting and restrictive ways of seeing, experiencing, and understanding the world around us. However, it is also a personal quest to confront my own unnecessarily high expectations and preconceived ideas of worth. The research endeavours to entice myself towards openness, flexibility, self-acceptance and faith in the unknown.
Emily Song (she/her) is an Australian-born Chinese emerging artist who is based across Naarm (Melbourne) and Boorloo (Perth). Her multidisciplinary practice is rooted in expanded drawing, manifesting through forms of sculptural textile work, installation and the moving image. Currently engaged with intuitive material exploration and spatial investigations, her process-driven practice utilises a sense of labour and repetitive methods of making, exploring ephemerality and impermanence. Her work experiments with conscious and unconscious ways of making as a method to understand the world around her, her own lived experiences and multifaceted identities, exploring the intersections of time, memory and place. Her most recent body of work foregrounds subtlety and the understated, where absences, traces and remains work together to elicit sensory and affective encounters of the installation.
instagram: @emily.yujie
