Emma Fielden, ‘Somewhere between silver and stone,’  2024, lapis lazuli, oil, silver point and gesso on linen, 60 x 70cm,  Photographer: Document Photography

Material Worlds

On Emma Fielden’s ‘Somewhere between Silver and Stone’

Q: What happens when the artist Emma Fielden picks up a paint brush for the first time, having just pulverised a chunk of lapis lazuli? A: ‘Somewhere between Silver and Stone’

Fielden is that paradoxical thing, a conceptual artist who is a materialist, not in the sense that she is a consumer, but that her art materials; ground, smashed, deconstructed, layered, re-applied, sometimes held up by magnetic forces, become, in essence, her work. When she works with sumi ink in a piece like Confluence it is the ink itself that is the Hero, when she starts on The Veil, it is the ink’s capacity to scale down to – well close to zero, the scale being an acute expression of both patience and application. And so, to the painting, ‘Somewhere between Silver and Stone’ Fielden’s first painting, selected for the 2024 Mosman Art Prize, suggests, one hopes, the beginning of a series of painting. 

While paintings usually acquire provenance after they have been created, through successive ownership, Fielden manages, by using materials bequeathed to her by the artist Margaret West to create an intrinsic provenance, working with inherited silver point to draw lines over a prepared linen surface of four layers of black gesso, and then by suspending lapiz lazuli, carefully ground, in sunflower oil. Fielden is, literally, working from, and with, scratch. 

Lapis Lazuli, both as a precious stone and as word is notable. The compound word from lapis — Latin for stone, and lazulum for blue, this second part with its roots in the Persian‘azure’, combine to give a liquid alliteration, the two parts suggesting a rock of heaven, blue stone, sky blue, azul, azure. Leaving the sea and sky to one side, blue is relatively rare in nature, lapis lazuli has always been a semi-precious jewel and a luxury for painters. 

So ‘Somewhere’, with its top strata of ground stone, what we have might be called, fancifully, and here I indulge in romance, a field of heaven. Fielden leaves a bit of grit in her blue powder, so we don’t get that mid-tone blue which we you might remember from the scarf of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, not the serene azure of the Virgin’s robes but a dark night sky blue-black that, if interrogated, glints, specks of scintillation, a surface that changes with the ambient lighting and the viewer’s angle of inspection. 

Recently at the launch of Judith Beveridge’s poetry collection Tintinnabulum — a book where the natural world is held up to the mind’s light and celebrated in a cascade of astonishing metaphors, where something is explained by allusion to everything but itself, which  might seem a curious way to go about but there is no doubt, it works — so when I go to write about EF’s new work, I find myself thinking about Henry Raeburn’s Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, for its feel of glide and grace, while in this work by EF’s there is no figure, there is a heightened sense of surface that has an icy, granular tactility, a sense of forward motion, maybe the work slightly lifts from the canvas?

Somewhere in ‘Somewhere between Silver and Stone’ Fielden has altered our optics, we are both very close and a long way off. Like lapiz lazuli that has travelled through time from one artist to another, like starlight. 

Carol Jenkins 

November  2024