Everything is Energy
– Emma Talbot
With luminous colours, flowing patterns and poetic handwritten texts, British artist Emma Talbot creates vibrant, imagined worlds based on her personal thought processes and the shared human experience of being alive today. Fascinated by the transience of human existence, Talbot raises deep questions about our place in a universe shaped by interconnection and perpetual change. Amid ecological collapse and political instability, her art illuminates the urgent need for a hopeful reimagining of the future – one shaped by resilience, creativity and care.
Intertwined worlds
Are You a Living Thing That Is Dying or a Dying Thing That Is Living? is Emma Talbot’s first solo exhibition in Denmark. It showcases a mesmerising site-specific installation uniting two new expansive silk paintings with three-dimensional textile works, a new animation and a series of intricate drawings, acting as the conceptual origin of the exhibition. The works intertwine the infinite mysteries of the universe, shaped by the artist’s imagination and expressed through drawing as intuitive reflections on the pressing challenges of our time. Ranging from incalculable states of destruction and chaos to intimate states of stillness, ecological harmony and imaginative journeys into the mind of animals, the works unfold themes of interspecies connectivity, sustainability, rebirth and human resilience – together summoning the existential question: ‘Are you a living thing that is dying or a dying thing that is living?’
Curated by Aukje Lepoutre Ravn.
Photo's by David Stjernholm. Courtesy Copenhagen Contemporary
Emma Talbot about ‘Everything is Energy’:
At the centre of a volatile landscape floats a cell, full of technology: underfloor heating, air conditioning, atomisers,diffusers, interactive mirrors, surveillance devices, sex toys, health and fitness monitors, speakers, computers, cameras, depilators, remote controls, headsets, a drone and a bot farm.
The cell is served by solar panels and electric wires, surrounded by fuse boxes and pipes.
Two figures in motion capture suits inhabit this space, full of 21st century white goods. White shiny surfaces, the extruded language of modernism, the purity of science fantasy. The dream of human transcendence from earthling to space thing.
Inside the cell, the humans are protected from the tempestuous outside world, existing in a totally conditioned, disconnected ‘reality’. From here, they control and influence the outside, but also contaminate it. Waste pipes pour toxic effluence into the environment. Satellites float overhead and crash to earth. Conflicts and storms rage.
Living beings outside the cells try to survive; a figure collects polluted water, sea life and birds expire - littering the land.
Everything is connected, every action has a consequence. Everything is energy; displaced and exploited, driven to extremes.
Above this epic, apocalyptic landscape, 8 individual panels, describe energetic transformations in nature, in trees, rocks & minerals.
Everything is Energy, 2025
silk on acrylic
6m x 14m.
Emma Talbot about ‘Are You a Living Thing that’s Dying, or a Dying thing that’s Living?':
This 6m x 14m painted silk hanging shares the extra long title of the show. Divided into two long ‘friezes’ of images, that repeat one another at one of the ends - A dark frieze for the nocturnal, for the interior night, for the last traces of consciousness, for dying and a Green frieze for the diurnal, the growing, the planted seed, the space of becoming and flourishing.
Nocturnal: a woman flies on a moth, transforms into a bird, is caught in a spiders web - all her internal ideas of freedom and limitation, potential and restriction buried deep in the interior darkness of her unconscious. A woman steps onto a giant hand, the palm marked with signs of destiny, to look outwards. The external eye is closing for the last time, shutting down the images of the mind. The colour is running out.
Diurnal: The scene repeats, the woman grows out of a new seed, the space is populated with life; with plants. The woman journeys on a Mayfly, the insect that lives the shortest life. The woman is a bird, that swoops through light air. The whole space is burgeoning and flourishing, weeds are growing - a dandelion, full of life - the text asks ‘Is joy a rebellious act?’
Are You a Living Thing that’s Dying, or a Dying thing that’s Living?, 2025
6m x 14m
painted silk hanging