What is your name/business name?
I’m Emma Lord, and my Folksy shop is ‘Strangelord’. The name evolved from a succession of online aliases. Stop by, to see a collection of collage and curiosities!
What do you make?
I’ve always struggled to commit myself to one discipline. For example –at University I studied painting, but my final show included photographic documents of performances, textile pieces and cakes!
I like the immediacy of collage. I believe that you can’t get more truth, more integrity, more spontaneity, than if you combine actual, physical objects, found imagery and materials. Why paint the buttons when you can stick them on, and have the added joy of textures and three dimensions?!
Most of my work takes the form of small scale assemblages of found treasures from my cherished hoards. I like the idea of miniature because it seems personal and precious, although I have worked larger scale, and past paintings have been at least a few feet.
I have a magpie’s eye, and am constantly of the scavenge for new resources. It’s not unknown for me to find things in the street. Maybe I just like to pretend I’m Robert Rauschenberg or Kurt Schwitters. ( I do disinfect things, don’t worry!)
How long have you been crafting for?
I’ve always been arty. When my baby brother was born (in ’86. I was 4) I made a comic book to commemorate the event.
My degree was Fine Art and Art History (2000-2003). I made my first little assemblage-collage during this time (‘House’).
I worked as an Artist in Residence at a local visual arts college shortly after graduating, which gave me the opportunity to start to develop my aesthetic. Now I work in a less directly-arty, and more emotionally draining role (as a youth Information, Advice and Guidance Worker) art and crafting is my escapism, my ‘me’ time, my own little way of restoring order to the chaos that is my life –arranging things neatly and sticking them into place. Just how I like things to be!
What is your favourite thing about your craft?
I love the vanity and self indulgence. I love when I can make someone smile. The masochistic side of me loves labouring and agonising for weeks over just how close together those two beads should be, what colours actually go with what, and if that charm hangs at just the right angle.
What is your least favourite thing?
Finding the right adhesive has been an issue in the past. I’m also finding that having been fairly prolific in recent years my work is piling up and up –upstairs we have a space which very much more resembles Sir John Soanes’ Museum than a spare bedroom!
But most of all I hate that I don’t have as much time as I’d like to spend on producing or promoting my art.
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Where do you sell your work?
My work is available on Folksy (the stuff that’s mail-able anyway). I like to exhibit in shows and am participating in The Great Sheffield Art Show for the second time this July (10th-12th at the Octagon if anyone’s interested), where 5 of my newest pieces will be for sale.
Where do you get your inspiration?
Fascination with collagists. Joseph Cornell is my hero. Peter Blake, Max Ernst. Although he’s not primarily a collagist (sculptor, photographer, some might say pornographer!), I’ve been obsessed by Hans Bellmer since my studying days. I like contradictions, and the subversive way he debases something sweet and innocent by juxtaposing it with the perverse, nightmarish and wrong. This is a theme I like to touch on in my own work, along with other Surrealist principles. The ‘chance encounter of the sewing machine and the umbrella on the dissecting table’, as Latreamont famously mused.
I’m inspired by the everyday objects I stumble across, as well as songs, stories, feelings, fears, people, everything really. The best inspiration though, is to sit on the floor, surrounded by my junk, waiting for the associations to emerge.
Anything else you would like to tell us?
I make art because I have to. It keeps me sane. My collages make me. If people take interest that’s a bonus. If they find meanings, or narratives, or simply bewilderment in what I’ve constructed, that’s even better. If they like the pretty colours, and how they all match perfectly, my life is complete.
Stay strange x
Mnay thanks to Emma for answering my questions and good luck at The Great Sheffield Art Show this week.
I'm off on my summer holidays to Cornwall tomorrow for 2 weeks, so won't be about until the 26th July, when I hope to be back with lots of lovely pics of Cornwall.
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