All hail Emma Hart! The winner of the 2015-17 Max Mara Women’s art prize has just unveiled Mamma Mia!, a spectacular and engaging installation that fills the Whitechapel’s number two gallery (until September 3) with a family of giant glazed ceramic heads, suspended from the ceiling like huge lamps that also double up as massive inverted jugs, sliced off at the spout/nose.
These suggestive vessels are the fruits of the six-month Italian residency that came with the prize, part of which Hart spent studying traditional Renaissance maiolica techniques in Todi and Faenza and part of which was spent as an observer at a special family therapy centre in Milan. With her own partner and daughter, observing and taking part in this very particular form of Milan Systemic Approach group therapy, which focuses on behavioural patterns between family members, has fed directly into the richly coloured, painted interiors of her head/jug/lamps.
Each glows with a lining of provocative patterning that also chimes with often fraught mental and emotional states: in one a succession of young women are repeatedly ensnared in the tendrils of a venus flytrap and oogled by the green eyes of jealousy, while in another rows of talon-nailed fingers press hot red buttons. Yet more form the shapes of repeated breasts, toes and heads.
It is also no coincidence that each of Hart’s dangling containers cast pools of light in the shape of cartoonish speech bubbles and so all appear to be having their own conversations. (If you dare, you can even stick your own head inside and become totally, disconcertingly immersed in these alternative head spaces.)
Given the amount of interaction going on in this most gregarious and communicative of shows, it was therefore especially appropriate that, at the dinner to celebrate Mamma Mia on 11 July, Hart made a particularly striking speech of her own. The Peckham-based artist paid special tribute to the relationships that she had formed during this most rich and diverse of Italian residencies–and at the same time proved that she had picked up another skill set–by eloquently addressing her Italian collaborators and supporters, including Luigi Maramotti, the chairman of Max Mara, in precisely delivered Italian.
British votes of thanks were made in her native, and decidedly South London, lingo. It’s the first time I have witnessed an English artist taking the trouble and the courage to acknowledge an overseas residency in such a way. Bravissima!