Instagram @itsemimartin
Emilia Martin
POLAND
Emilia is an artist passionate about storytelling and myths, primarily working with the media of photography, sound, and writing. She grew up between two radically different realities: her grandmother's remote farm in rural Eastern Poland and Silesia, a heavy industry coal-mining urban region in the west of the country.
The clash between these two realities—the narrative of extractivism and patriarchy versus rural mythologies and the sublime—formed a space where she felt at home, a space that continues to nurture her artistic practice. In her work, she explores the power of speculation and the reimagining of the realities she inhabits.
She perceives myths, tales, and storytelling as effective tools for revising the past and weaving livable futures she wishes to inhabit. Through the use of speculation and shifting perspectives, she revises and constructs personal narratives informed by intersectional feminist approaches.
- SERIES -
I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears
Ancient mythology is filled with cautionary tales where young, eloquent females were punished for their outspokenness and turned into rocks.
A curse of Medusa meant that she transformed anyone she looked at into a rock: mute, passive, motionless and unable to express. Some rocks were believed to be gods, chained to the ground in case they decided to make a return to heavens; celebrated, feared. Some took on central roles in the communities becoming places of worship, grief, sacrifice.
For over two years I have been collecting rock stories. Many of them belong to folk people, such as my ancestors: collectively woven myths that gave ground to caring rituals of relating to space, the land, to one another. Over time these stories fluctuate, gently passed for generations.
The longer I give in to my obsession, the more I begin to believe that a rock is not mute at all, but perhaps, the most excellent storyteller of them all.
“I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears” is an exploration of a rock as a carrier of stories, a migratory body, a silent, mysterious visitor, filled with projections, dreams and fears. It is an investigation of the myths, stories and rituals and an act of reclaiming them back.