“Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course. It happened to me… on that summer’s day, when my eyes were opened to the sea… From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to the earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.” Jacques Yves Cousteau, Oceanographer
Emma Levine is someone who works with the essence of things. Each collection is transformative and poetic: it quietly changes how we perceive the familiar through the interplay of colour, form repeated in shadow, and the delicate gradation of light. Earth Ocean embodies a valuable and timely connection to the natural elements that surround and sustain us. "Emma Levine represents a new era of female British artists. Her deeply intuitive connection to the natural world resonates with collectors searching for exceptional work,” says Serena Morton.
For some time now, those familiar with Levine’s forests of spun silk have been asking her about the roots. Will you ever make a tree with its roots? Is the tree also its roots when turned upside down? Could the roots be represented by those entomology pins, which anchor each tree to its coloured field? And perhaps this low ebb of gentle probing has carried Levine to the ocean, where she has dipped under the waves to find them. After seven years of working in Northamptonshire, she has moved south to be closer to her children and the sea.
It is there, beneath the waves, that the earth is rooted. Invisible to most, the coral reefs act like great living connective tissue to sustain life in the ocean, one that is inextricably bound to our future on this planet. As rising global temperatures warm the earth’s oceans, thousands of kilometers of multiple coral species face extinction. Unless we find a way to collaborate, and tend to this expansive system of interdependent genus, we will loose the key to our future.
“There is a natural line from tree roots to ocean floor, so the transition from tree to coral was very instinctive. With this subject I am playing with the accumulation of time through layers and shadow, but also there is an idea of rising and falling levels that relates to the earth’s water table and sea levels.” Emma Levine
With kind permission from Miranda Lowe and Vicky Paterson at the Natural History Museum (via Gabriella Grafftey-Smith) Levine spent hours amongst the collected coral specimens. Studying their intricate patterns, willowy branches and lissom forms, she began her artistic enquiry. Coral reefs are a compound of the living and the dead where the past and the present co-exist in a repeating pattern of skeletal structures. There are over 2,500 coral species, about half of these being hard corals that build reefs, and approximately 1,500 soft corals with flexible skeletons, so they can bow and twist with the currents. For this living pillar, colour plays a vital role as hatched baby coral favour the light white and pink hues of a healthy coral bed to reattach.
“I became interested in uncovering and exposing and the essential elements that form the natural structures around us. Trees are essentially carbon, which has three states: diamond, amorphous and graphite. Coral namely comprises of calcium carbonate, one of natures most abundant raw materials. In essence these forms are the same, yet how they look all depends on what they are exposed to: air, water or at some point both. So I've pressed charcoal into paper, used crystals like diamonds, and created what looks like calcium for corals. My images are slices of earth or ocean.” Emma Levine
Levine’s collections are a sensitive and thoughtful illustration of the many unique aspects of coral. Her intuitive sense of colour is balanced against what she feels in response to these forms, whilst the procedural act of layering and attaching each cut out reflects the structural integrity of her subject, just as a hatched coral would choose to attach. Hence the final act of lifting each form up to its optimum level on pins brings each composition to life.
“Adaptation to water levels is crucial to the survival of the species. The oldest corals we have today have been alive for over 4,000 years having endured the lowest water levels and now those rising today. I am very conscious of this whilst pinning and raising each form, the process is very much connected to the idea of water levels – it’s about where the piece stops.” Emma Levine
Deceptively simple, these pieces begin with photographic research. Levine then digitally reduces a chosen image to its essential form and transfers this onto archival Somerset paper hand bound with silk. The subject is then cut out using laser, and hand finished to produce a floating relief, which is united to its base layer of paper with charcoal or silk with entomology pins. She is preserving the essence of what she felt on seeing that form - setting it in a glass case, dusting it with crystals - as something precious to behold. Earth Ocean reminds us how fragile and fleeting the opportunity for experiencing natural beauty has become, and connects us to the moment.
“If, to my hands, from its havocs and bounties,
The Sea might appoint me a ferment, a portion, a fruit,
I would speak for that concord of distance, perspectives of steel,
Evenings and airs of alerted extension –
Your power, like a language of whiteness, O Ocean
The spoilure and rending of columns,
Into innocent essence brought low…”
Pablo Neruda, Open Sea
EXHIBITIONS
ARTISTS FOR BLUE Andrea Hamilton Studio November 2019
THE BLUE EDITION Andrea Hamilton Studio London November 2016
SENSE OF PLACE Art Bastion Miami April 2016
OCEAN EARTH Serena Morton Gallery London May 2016
SPACE BETWEEN US Serena Morton Gallery London March 2015
http://serenamorton.com/perch/resources/emma-levine-catalogue-1.pdf