EMILY FLOYD (MELBOURNE)

Emily Floyd is attracted to texts that focus on identity and place and that offer new ways of thinking about these issues in the light of globalisation and post-colonialism. She is interested in the malleability of language and its connection to knowledge and power. The process Floyd employs to produce her numerous large-scale wooden letters mirrors the anxiety and obsessions with the various novels they are referencing – Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment', Kafka's 'The Trial' and Camus' 'The Outsider'.

At Gertrude she exhibited a project entitled The Cultural Studies Reader: 38 Topics For A Group Show in Studio 12:S tructuring her work around the chapter headings in Simon During’s Cultural Studies Reader, Emily Floyd’s sprawling metropolis, populated by a multitude of rabbits, was a self-conscious cultural landscape proposing ‘38 topics for a group show’. Continuing the artist’s analysis of the ritual relationships between artists and institutions, Floyd’s installation was a self-consciously allegorical work about discourse, power and community. Divided into island groups, the rabbits appeared to be continually thwarted from leaving their designated discourses. Oppressed by the vocabulary of the surroundings, they remained forever subjected to the banality of critique.

Emilt Floyd has exhibited around Australia. Her works are present in the collection of the NGV International, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Simmons and Simmons, London and Queensland Art Gallery.

 Emily Floyd is represented my Anna Schwartz Gallery.

This information was current at the time of her residency.