Cool Hunter Predictions: Emily Parsons-Lord

For Emily Parsons-Lord, the air that we breathe is both a physical and conceptual space. Or, as the artist puts it: “there’s a whole ecosystem in the air.”

Words: Naomi Riddle

Photography: Jacquie Manning

A 2017 finalist in the prestigious NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship and resident at Parramatta Artists Studios, Parsons-Lord’s eclectic practice moves effortlessly between performance, installation, video, and sculpture. She works with the most unusual of materials: a plant distress pheromone, the minerals in fireworks, or gallium (a metal that has a melting point of 29.76 degrees). But it’s her preoccupation with air, and its relationship to climate change, that unites her practice – be it in the Co2-filled exhale of a politician’s breath in Our Fetid Rank (2015), or a small button that releases “future air” in The Confounding Leaving (2016).

2018 has been a mammoth year for Parsons-Lord: a pyrotechnic performance in response to Lee Kun-Yong’s Equal Area at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, a group show at Penrith Regional Gallery and a solo show at Sydney multidisciplinary space Cement Fondu. She was a finalist in the John Frieze Award and performed another explosive feat to a wide-eyed crowd at Sydney Contemporary art fair.

Parsons-Lord finished off the year in Adelaide, exhibiting as part of Vitalstatistix’s Climate Century – a three-week festival of climate change art for the 21st century. Then Let Us Run (The Sky is Falling) considers the process of stratospheric aerosol injection: a scientific proposal for combatting climate change where substances are released into the upper atmosphere in order to lower temperatures. One side effect of this is the permanent removal of blue from the sky. In creating an immersive environment that mimics this altered sky-space, Parsons-Lord presents a visceral installation that brings together climate science, speculative fiction, tragi-humour and the atmosphere itself.

2019 sees Parsons-Lord undertake a three- month development as artist-in-residence at the LungA School in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, obtain her pyrotechnic licence, and exhibit at the Cementa19 festival in Kandos. Given that climate change is rapidly becoming the greatest challenge of our time, it seems certain that Parsons-Lord’s planetary empathy will continue to be an essential salve when reckon- ing with our impending environmental crisis.

This article was originally published in Art Collector issue 87, JAN-MAR 2019.

FOLLOW THIS ARTIST

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

READ MORE

Breaking News: Richard Lewer

Responding to his daily newsfeed with paint, Richard Lewer brings fifty-one new works to the Aotearoa Art Fair — a compendium of political flashpoints, personal memory and social observation distilled into an “over-stylised simplicity”.
Read more
Emma Buswell in her studio.

Cool Hunter: Emma Buswell

Emma Buswell transforms kitsch cultural moments like the Coles roast chicken bachelor’s handbags into labour-intensive textile works that probe power, mythology, and the absurdities of contemporary Australian life.
Read more

New Directions: Sara Hughes

Sara Hughes has spent two decades transforming civic spaces. In her most recent show, she turns inward, mounting a generous inquiry into artistic inheritance and the women artists who continue to guide her vision.
Read more

Curator’s Radar: Atong Atem

From her monumental self-portrait at the National Portrait Gallery to presentations at Tate Modern and Paris Photo, the South-Sudanese artist’s practice continues to assert new narratives of identity and belonging.
Read more

Mike Parr: Look closely at what you’d rather not see

Read more
Philip Wolfhagen pats his dog

Philip Wolfhagen: Fields of Vision

Read more
Follow a manual added link

Art Collector acknowledges and pays respect to the Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country across Australia, the land on which we live, work, and create.

feedback@artcollector.net.au

Measuring UpCool Hunter Predictions: Kai Wasikowski