As If Looking Is Knowing by Emelia Kerr Beale

Nomas* Projects, September 2021

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Bio

Emelia Kerr Beale is a Nottingham-born artist and recent graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, who is currently based in Glasgow. They work across drawing, sculpture and textile to process the complexities of illness and centre experiences of discomfort, pleasure, anxiety and joy. Through the use of recurring motifs, they consider the ways in which imagination and repetition can be coping mechanisms. Their research is rooted in feminist disability studies and queer theory, as well as lived and embodied experience.

As a person with ADHD, they believe neurodivergent ways of making and thinking are meaningful artistic approaches, and their work is often informed by impulsivity and a necessity of means. They are passionate about rejecting gendered neuro-normativity and resisting notions of ‘productivity’ under capitalism that permeate language around neurodiversity at every level, and therefore a lot of their thinking is around rest and the rested body.

They have recently shown work at GENERATORprojects, Dundee, and Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, undertaken residencies on the Isle of Eigg with the Bothy Project and at Hospitalfield, Arbroath, and received commissions from Tonic Arts and Disability Arts Online.