Graham's Blog

Emma Wade

Our forth guest speaker was from an artist named Emma Wade.

After graduating with an MA from the Fine Art Department of the National College of Art and Design Dublin in 2008 Emma got the opportunity to go to New York as part of an internship with the Guggenheim museum. Here she practiced in new media. Working abroad sounded very interesting and is something I plan on doing after I finish college. Emma strongly recommended taking an internship if we get the opportunity to. I’d say it is a great experience working abroad.

After New York she took up a residency in the Limerick City Gallery. She worked here along side a group of artists and overall the experienced sounded cool.She then went on to talk about and show us some of her previous work, including the piece she did for her masters.

Personally I didn’t quit get her work. It was all  a very different take on art and something i’m not used to seeing. Her work is very interactive and maybe that’s why I didn’t think it was so great. I’m sure if i had the chance to see and interact with her work i would enjoy it alot more but from seeing pictures of it, it didn’t seem like my cup of tea.

She made an interesting piece called the “Rexotrek”. this was her piece submitted for here masters in NCAD. the whole idea behind it was to show that dogs can be happy. She spent months recording audio and video of her dog pretty much just running about. she attached a specialist camera to the dogs head and pretty much let it run free while she followed close behind with a laptop recording the data from the camera that was mounted on the dogs head. Personally I didn’t like the footage, it was very hard to make out what was going on and overall not very interesting.

She set up a display in a gallery for her masters where people had to literally crawl into to see the footage, giving them a good look at what a dog sees. Not something I would be to keen on doing. Call me old fashioned but I like my art on a wall where I can rub my chin and look like I understand what I am looking at, but hey! that’s just me.

Some of her other work was very similar to the Rexotrek, in the sense that it involves some sort of human interaction. Which is very creative and I appreciate the amount of work that went into them but they were not my cup of tea.