Dan's Blog

Good afternoon to you. It’s the end of Tuesday which is nice. Yesterday morning we had our 4th guest speaker in by the name of Emma Wade.

Emma is currently a visual artist who hails from Wexford and she came to talk to us about college and what she has been doing since. Emma graduated with an MA from the Fine Art Department of the National College of Art and Design Dublin in 2008. She then went to New York on an internship in the Guggenheim museum where she practiced in new media. Sounds like an excellent opportunity to get to learn in such a place and Emma said to us if we get a chance to do an internship we should definitely go for it. I’d love to as it would prepare me for the actual working world instead of me wandering into something I’m not going to like. Last year, I think it was, she undertook an artist residency in Limerick City Gallery where she and a few other artists created an installation and she’s currently based out of Redspace studios in Dublin.

During the talk Emma showed us the work she has done for her masters and her other creations since leaving college. Being honest they weren’t really my cup of tea but they were quite different and showed a lot of creativity. So each to their own I guess. “Play and humour are used as tools to provoke thought, as well as entertain, in Emma’s practice.”. I found this line on her website and it describes perfectly (from what i’ve seen) what she is all about. Most of her work looks like fun and is very audience interactive too.

For example she showed us ‘Rexotrek’ (great name) which is what she did for her masters in ncad. It was to try show that a dog can be happy. Apparently scientists haven’t proven that animals can be ‘happy’. This fits into the theme of Science vs Pseudo Science and is a running theme through some of her work. She recorded audio and video for a few months by attaching equipment to her parents dog and brought it to different places like parks, the beach etc and let it run around. She used devices such as GPS, mini CCTV camera, mini-disk recorder with a VOiP headset. I had to laugh when she was telling us about running around after the dog with her laptop in her hands trying to record the footage. For her masters she set up an installation in a gallery where people literally had to get on their hands and knees to see the footage of the ‘happy dog’ running about.  

She has done some other art projects like ‘hugs’ that can be seen on her website http://www.emmawade.com/index.html which are quite interesting.

Until next week.