Ghost Calls (SOLD OUT)

Emma Talbot

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About the publication

Ghost Calls is a new soft cover book published as part of Emma Talbot’s exhibition Ghost Calls at Dundee Contemporary Arts. It contains an introduction by DCA’s Director, Beth Bate, newly commissioned writing by Helen Charman and So Mayer, as well as a conversation between the artist and DCA’s Head of Exhibitions, Eoin Dara.

Charman’s work Worm-Talk recognises our separation through screens and windows, and the almost narcotic relief of online connection, against the backdrop of nature taking its dark, inevitable course, its “grudging necromancy”.

Mayer’s Listen to the State of Us brings spectral bird-like figures into a post-pandemic society, with all of the references to viruses, vaccinations and mutations we recognise from 2020, along with a “sky full of words” and “fabric we paint finely” that connects us back into Talbot’s work, through mathematics and data, grain and skin.

Finally, in their conversation together, Talbot and Dara talk about the development of the artist's recent work, weaving together intimate details and observations with references to influential literary and poetic sources from Luce Irigaray to Diane di Prima.

Date February 2021
Edition of 400
Design Valerie Norris
ISBN 978-1-9993223-9-7
Dimensions 19 x 12cm
Pages 72

About the Artist

Emma Talbot (b. 1969, UK) studied at the Birmingham Institute of Art & Design and the Royal College of Art. She currently holds the post of Tutor in Painting at the Royal College of Art’s School of Arts and Humanities.

Her work has previously been exhibited at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Arcadia Missa, New York; GEM Kunstmuseum, The Hague; Petra Rinck Galerie, Dusseldorf; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Drawing Room, London, The Freud Museum; London; Galerie Onrust, Amsterdam; Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen and Tate St. Ives, Cornwall.

In March 2020 she was awarded the 8th Max Mara Prize for Woman in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery London and Maramotti Foundation Italy, and through this award is working towards a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2021/22. She is represented by Galerie Onrust, Amsterdam and Petra Rinck Galerie, Düsseldorf.

About the Writers

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her second pamphlet, Daddy Poem, was shortlisted for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize; her latest, In the Pleasure Dairy, is published by Sad Press. Her first nonfiction book, Mother State - a political history of motherhood - is forthcoming from Allen Lane. She teaches English Literature at Durham University, and is an associate member of staff at Camberwell College of Arts and the Glasgow School of Art. As resident commissioning editor at MAP magazine, she is running the year-long TENANCY project.

So Mayer is a writer, bookseller, film curator, and organiser. In 2020, they published A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula Press), an essay on art, bodies and fascism. Their other books include film criticism such as Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (IB Tauris, 2015) and poetry such as jacked a kaddish (Litmus Publishing, 2018), as well as contributions to anthologies such as Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota, 2018), At the Pond (Daunt, 2019) and On Relationships (3 of Cups, 2020). Mayer works with queer feminist film curation collective Club des Femmes, and is a founder of Raising Films, a campaign and community for parents & carers in the UK screen sector.