Susan Emmerson: Tears Along the Edge

“All art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion” —James Baldwin

I make art about natural disasters: meditations on the loss of home and community and our changing climate. Experimenting with materials is central to my practice as I use Tyvek (a plastic paper) to create sculptural wall collages, drawings and paintings.

For this show I have taken Tyvek and created multiple small, seemingly gutted skeletal objects emptied of all but a glimpse of color within. I installed them to create the tracing of a coastline, ravaged and torn. The shape recalls the area of Florida over which Hurricane Michael made landfall in 2018; in its wake leaving shoreline communities devastated, thousands of homes destroyed and taking scores of lives.

On the opposite wall, a piece made with black Tyvek recalls the total devastation of the California wildfires, where the debris is barely identifiable; the fire transforming homes and cherished possessions into toxic liquified sludge. Its seeming fragility belies the forces it represents.