Emma Belsham

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

Lovesick

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language.

This body of work is an inevitably flawed attempt to speak about love. The words “I love you” have lost their ability to be sincere. Romance is a script that we follow. It is a script that has been written for us by romantic comedies and Barbara Cartland novels. How, then, can we speak about love without slipping into cliches? Lovesick aims to develop a lexicon for love while acknowledging that all my attempts will only amount to pink “muck”. I have turned to the act of painting as a way of finding a language through translation.

In the same way that Roland Barthes offers a discursive site for love - “the site of someone

speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not

Speak” - my studio practice this year has been a discursive site where I have given myself space to contemplate love alone.

I am approaching love with both cynicism and sincerity.

I am offering a non-linear, complex contemplation of intimacy.

I am playing the role of the boy-obsessed teenage girl or the pining, hysterical woman.

I have appropriated the language of pink. I think of this as the language of obsession, of Dear Diary..., of heart-shaped things. I cannot help but regurgitate the only language that has given words to love - yet I crave a new language.

Pink is both corporeality and artificiality. It is at once innocent and erotic.

I am asking how the internet digests our love and mediates our desire.

I have taken off my clothes and exposed myself as a hopeless romantic.

I am straddling the grey area between a sickly-sweet, cheapened, synthetic pop culture lexicon of love and a gentler reflection on my own relationship with love. In this grey area, the boundaries between love/lust, friendship/romance and sincerity/performance become pixelated.

Oil paint has served me well for an exploration of closeness. It is skin pressed up against skin. The body seems to have come apart, opened itself up, and burst at the seams. It is the inside of a mouth or a beating heart, or a stomach full of butterflies. Unknowingly, I have been seduced by the medium. What began as a monologue about romance has become a love affair between myself and paint. After a year of making and loving, my conclusion is that love is not pink but grey. However, my work has culminated in a studio full of pink. It seems that despite my cynicism, I am still attached to love’s ideals. I keep being seduced by pinks, by the romance of it all, despite the grey.