Exhibition Essay
Fulvia Mantelli, Director Murray Bridge Regional Gallery
Lottie Emma feels the world. Cloudy with a Chance of Mum Storms is about humanness: wrangling emotions, championing compassion, speaking out and keeping it real.
Emma’s practice springs from an appreciation of traditional textiles skills developed by generations of women as carers. Her early exquisite floral embroideries on hand-dyed fabrics are very accomplished. However, primarily made to meet market-driven tastes, something felt missing. The 2023 Country Arts SA Nebula was a catalyst for a thrilling transformation, which Emma describes as “tearing open the seams” of her practice, allowing herself to “go rogue”.
Unshackled from fiscal and aesthetic expectations, she turned to her experiences as a mother raising a special needs child amidst acutely flawed systems riddled with cracks. Needle and thread in hand and bursting to scream with rage and frustration at society’s devaluing of neuro diversity, she summoned her vulnerability and her true voice. Radically experimental, conceptual soft sculptures emerged, using discarded textiles, free machine embroidery, hand stitching, aerosols, acrylics and crafting materials with electrifying immediacy. These highly intuitive works unpick and articulate her palpable narrative about processing intense emotions.
Holding space for the value of playfulness in navigating absurd systemic failures, Emma’s practice is now fuelled by fun, curiosity and an empowering acceptance of the glorious diversity in how our brains are wired. In a spirit of anarchy against dominant ‘normative behaviour’, she takes cues from her adult son’s wonderfully lateral and hilariously literal ways of perceiving the world.
Audacious, courageous, vibrant and raw, her works speak of fragility, tenacity and resilience through her materials, iconography and processes. Repurposing fabrics suggests salvaging the neglected, choosing textures to reflect a gamut of emotions: stiff tulle lightning bolts symbolise a mother’s determined advocacy, while soft chiffon clouds pour out her depleted energy. Like portals to our shared sentience, recurring eyes are metaphors for humanity, as well as the weighty responsibility to constantly keep watch for her son’s everyday safety. Stitch work evokes ‘mending’ something or someone, as well as piercing perceptions and poking at holes in the system. Pushing traditional techniques to extremes, impossibly long bullion knots embody the delicate balance a mother needs, to keep it all together for everyone, holding firm but not too tightly to remain intact and tangle-free.
Often referring to herself as a “brewing storm”, Emma is both emboldened and exhausted by her “advocacy against the ludicrous” to protect her family. As a form of release, she tackles overwhelming expectations and depressive seriousness with humour and a freedom of imagination that’s so often beaten out of us by demands to conform to a linear cognitive framework. Stitch by stitch she prods at societal judgments, to dissolve stigmas of brokenness about people, as she says, “who think outside the box and never seem to fit in the square”.
Echoing the polymorphic nature of humanity, Emma’s rambunctious amorphic and biomorphic forms are unapologetically candid in expressing profound, complex and enormous feelings. Cloudy with a Chance of Mum Storms is a story of the loving tenderness of a raging tempest.