Emily Hannah Shepherd

Making the absurdist domestic in a miniature scale is my current fascination. I have played with the absurdity that comes from making foods only just out of place in the home pictorially; like an onion skin on a chair. Absurdity also comes from transforming preserved foods into art objects by raising them on a miniature plinth. The home was my muse, as somewhere I could easily draw inspiration from and that is universally relatable for the viewer.

Heightening and finding hidden values in the domestic has been my intention. To facilitate this I have been preserving tiny foods with paper-like qualities, usually from scraps that would otherwise be thrown away, then appropriating these foods into series of miniature drawings in which they are pictorially displaced throughout the home.

Investigation of the materiality of paper parallels my investigation of the materiality of foods. ‘Discovering’ hidden foods has brought me a great sense of joy. Originally I preserved these beings in order to appropriate them in drawn form, but they are so fascinating in their beauty I wanted to display them alongside, like two parallel and intertwining conversations.

Photography has been a way for me to digitally confuse relative scale, deepening the intrigue of these works. Meanwhile, drawing will always be my primary way of understanding the things I create. I like the way such precise marks and depth can be produced, and the small differences in graphite weight that produce such large differences in effect.

These stuffs are placed upon furniture (pictorially in the drawings) simply because I find the displacement of these objects I've created to be funny - they are just out of place and slightly anthropomorphised.