Emily Wilock: Delicate Kingdom

Emily Wilcock’s work vibrates with unbridled zeal, anxiety and playfulness, emerging from her subconscious. Her charged psychological portraits are frozen in a state of becoming with imagined characters, rendered in vibrant oil and acrylic paint, often pinned to the canvas with needle and black thread. These tangled figures morph into one another or transform into a bodily metropolis of churning gears, trembling satellites and soaring skyscrapers. Working intuitively, Wilcock gently captures her various idiosyncratic characters as they spin into unreachable and unrecognisable dystopian worlds.

An Australian expat who moved to London when she was twelve, Wilcock is constantly inventing and reinventing a sense of place. Her work becomes a home to return to. Wilcock’s gestural pen and ink drawings are punctuated with many forms of world-making. There are figures that become their surroundings (an octo-eyed head becomes a winding desert road) and those who find a sense of place within themselves (a girl with a house for a heart, balancing single-windowed homes from fragile antennae jutting out of her head). Yet, other figures float in or through empty space, clinging to one another or alone in fluid motion, shedding their past en route.

Wilcock’s work contains a tension between psychological escapism and a sense of return. Her subjects find their newest form in the more peopled world of her lithographic prints. Unlike Wilcock’s drawings, the monochromatic compositions of these prints are busier and more complex, as mysterious faces emerge from the darkness. Doe-eyed faces appear from Wilcock’s subconscious as we are invited to step forth into the artist’s delicate kingdom.