Emma Talbot  – interview: ‘I imagine the experience of life as an epic story – the one we all have’

Large installations, paintings on silk, fabric sculptures and drawings convey the connection between the specific and the universal and between life and death. Talbot tells us how myth, tragedy and politics colour her magical world

Emma Talbot. Photo © the artist.

by SABINE CASPARIE

I meet Emma Talbot at Compton Verney a day before the official opening of her exhibition How We Learn to Love, her largest UK exhibition to date. Talbot moves between studios in London and Italy, and has a simultaneous solo exhibition in Copenhagen Contemporary and a solo presentation at Centraal Museum Utrecht. I imagine she must be busy, but she generously shows me around the entire exhibition before we sit down to talk on a bench outside.

The exhibition brings together more than 20 new and recent works, including her trademark installations comprising paintings, fabric sculptures on colourful plinths, animations and a new series of drawings. In Talbot’s work the same figure appears, a stylised female with long, sleek hair. “She is an idea of how I imagine myself from the inside,” Talbot says. “That is why she never has a face.” Talbot paints on silk, the process resembling drawing in its fluency and immediacy and resulting in a luminosity and vibrancy of colour that is distinctly hers. The female protagonist makes her way through richly imagined landscapes of colourful patterns, interspersed by bubbles of text. The playful, child-like handwriting betrays its profound philosophical and emotional content, inspired by extensive research.

Emma Talbot: How We Learn to Love, installation view, Compton Verney, 2025. Photo: Jamie Woodley © Jamie Woodley and Compton Verney.

The Human Experience (2023), a series of monumental silk paintings that wraps around the gallery, introduces the central theme of Talbot’s work – the human experience from birth to death, contained in a body. The Tragedies (2024) combines references to Greek tragedy and myth with the tragedies of current political events. It is the most striking installation in the exhibition, a tent-like sculpture in stark blacks and yellows with two soft skeletons curled up on the floor inside it. Purple fabric arms and blue heads protrude from the roof of the “tent” as if reaching for something unattainable. “They are the chorus,” Talbot explains. “In our period of time, the chorus is social media; the public is trying to understand from the chorus what is happening.”

Emma Talbot: How We Learn to Love, installation view, Compton Verney, 2025. Photo: Jamie Woodley © Jamie Woodley and Compton Verney.

In lockdown, Talbot taught herself animation. In The Trials (2022), first shown at the Whitechapel gallery in 2022, Talbot has reimagined the 12 trials of Hercules, giving agency to her female protagonist who is trying to resolve the problems not with aggression, but with knowledge gained by the principles of permaculture – a framework for living sustainably based on the cycles of nature. A beautifully haunting melody from the animation Keening Songs (2021) flows through the second part of the exhibition. First shown at Dundee Contemporary Arts in 2021, the work references ancient modes of communication inspired by the Celtic tradition of “keening” – funerary songs to help recently deceased souls reach the next world. Grief is a theme that recurs in Talbot’s work – her husband died when their sons were only six and seven – but it is always inextricably bound up with love and the cycles of nature, a fundamental part of life.

Alongside these large installations are drawings that inspired them, and fabric sculptures that Talbot sees as three-dimensional drawings. The connection between the specific and the universal weaves through all Talbot’s work, richly imagined in a magical world full curiosity and wonder. “The idea is that as you move along the space, you move along the life experience, imagined as an epic story – the one we all have.”

Emma Talbot: How We Learn to Love, installation view, Compton Verney, 2025. Photo: Jamie Woodley © Jamie Woodley and Compton Verney.

Emma Talbot was born in 1969 in Stourbridge and studied at the Birmingham Institute of Art & Design and the Royal College of Art in London. She is the winner of the 8th Max Mara Prize for Women and was represented at the 2022 Venice Biennale in The Milk of Dreams. Her works has been exhibited widely in the UK, Europe and Asia.

Talbot talked to Studio International in the garden of Compton Verney the day before the exhibition opening.

Sabine Casparie: You have a history with the West Midlands, having been born in Stourbridge and studying at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. What does it feel like to have your solo exhibition here?

Emma Talbot: I don’t have family connections here, as my family moved to London when I was young, but when I first came to Compton Verney after they invited me, I realised that the museum is very special. The relationship between the museum and the surrounding nature perfectly suits the subject of my work. All the works in the show, apart from the recent drawings, were shown in different countries and it is also great seeing them together here for the first time.

SC: You have said that your work always starts with drawing, and you used the term “listening in”, which I found really interesting. What do you mean by it?

ET: Drawing is about trying to articulate what I am thinking, and that thinking can be on different levels: sometimes my thinking is verbal and at other times there are images. It is about letting something come out and seeing what that is. Drawing for me is being true to the things in my mind.

SC: Your works are collages: pieces of fabric stitched together, combining image and text. Where does your interest in collage come from?

ET: What I find really exciting about collage is the disruption. When I sew together the different parts, I find that sometimes they line up, but I am not trying to make that happen. Things not being perfect and seamless is an important part of the language of my work. But something I have been thinking about more recently is the way we gather information in our contemporary age, seeing a lot of images and random things together in a kind of fragmented stream. A single painting provides a way of looking, but a collage is much closer to what we are doing outside in the world.

Emma Talbot: How We Learn to Love, installation view, Compton Verney, 2025. Photo: Jamie Woodley © Jamie Woodley and Compton Verney.

SC: The Tragedies (2024) is your darkest work: the dominance of black, the two skeleton sculptures, the themes of grief and destruction. It isn’t depressing, because your work never is, but is there a reason why this work is darker than the other works?

ET: My work deals with the things I am preoccupied by; whatever happens feeds into my work. We are living in the most volatile times I have seen in my lifetime. The Tragedies are based on Greek theatre. You could see a tragedy as something that is formally interesting, but if it is very close to the stories happening around you it has a much greater impact. Tragedies is a gathering up of all tragedies, and the work is asking: “Why do they keep happening? Can we imagine a different way?”

SC: A lot of your works reference myths. When did your interest in myths start?

ET: I was really lucky that when I went to state secondary school, they still had classics as a subject. I loved it. Myths are metaphoric stories that get played out again in every era, so there must be something in the bones of these stories that we recognise. They are quite often about power. In The Tragedies, I was drawn to the story of Medea who sacrifices her two sons. In the UK, we are currently talking about reintroducing conscription to the army, and I have two sons, so is there really that much difference? Medea is angry because losing her partner, Jason, means that she will become stateless, but that part often gets lost in the story, even though it is a really problematic situation, one that so many people are experiencing right now. The myth stands away from our time, but at the same time it reflects on it.

SC: A question that occupies me a lot is whether art can bring change. Do you think about that? Do you think about the audience for your work?

ET: In all my work there is the question of power. A small percentage of people hold power and lately we are seeing that, as things become more fractured and volatile, the patriarchal idea becomes more defended. I find that really questionable. Power can be distributed differently, and we see evidence of that in previous civilisations – it is possible. I don’t think that art can directly change a person’s actions; it is more about creating a consciousness that allows people to reflect and question.

Emma Talbot: How We Learn to Love, installation view, Compton Verney, 2025. Photo: Jamie Woodley © Jamie Woodley and Compton Verney.

SC: Your work has ties to ecofeminism. Do you think women are better able to ask questions?

ET: It is not about women or men or gender; it is more about a female sensibility that operates in a different way than an alpha-male sensibility, foregrounding acts of caring and gathering and compassion. I am inspired by Ursula K Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Le Guin writes of how action stories and hero stories become the boldest stories, but they don’t really resolve things; they are just demonstrations of power. In those moments of aggression there were women in the background, gathering and carrying food, fulfilling roles that don’t have the same linear projection of story but are repetitive acts of care. My work The Trials reinterprets the 12 trials of Hercules using the figure of an elderly woman. She is an unlikely hero, but why? In mythology, Athena is the one who is really wise; when Hercules doesn’t know how to do things, she comes up with suggestions of the alternative. She is in the background when he performs the role of hero. That fascinates me.

SC: I am thinking of another great book about narrative structure: Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode. It talks about the repetitive patterns in nature and how they inspire a different kind of story from the hero’s journey of climax and denouement. Is the use of patterns in your work inspired by nature?

ET: It is more about the decorative. When I was a student of painting in the 90s, decorative patterns were considered less interesting than other types of image-making. When I started including patterns, I painted on silk or on very thin paper with watercolour. I felt like I was using all the methods that were thought of as weaknesses. So, I decided to turn it around and use these methods as my language, something powerful. I see it as a feminist position, that my story can be told in my own way.

Emma Talbot: How We Learn to Love, installation view, Compton Verney, 2025. Photo: Jamie Woodley © Jamie Woodley and Compton Verney.

SC: And what was the reaction to you making that kind of work?

ET: I usually get very positive reactions to my work! It was just programmed in my mind that there were certain things that you must not do. In the time I was being taught, female stories of the domestic and narrative images had also fallen by the wayside, but after my husband, Paul, died, it was as if I wanted to be the most pathetic I could be. I was at a point where everything had fallen apart, and I wondered whether I could ever make art again, so I just did what I needed to do.

SC: The older woman who appears in your Max Mara Prize work, The Age/L’Età, was influenced by Klimt’s painting The Three Ages of Woman. Were you also influenced by Klimt’s use of patterns and the decorative?

ET: I had already been using patterns. What drew me to the Klimt painting is that it was acquired by the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome to celebrate 50 years of the unification of Italy. So, it also had a political message as well as being an image of three women. The elderly figure for me represented old practices, relations with nature, superstitions – ways of understanding the world that don’t feed into a modernist idea of society. It was as if the modern nation was embarrassed by the notion of this elderly “nonna”, whereas I felt that she could be someone holding the knowledge that we are turning to today to try to survive.

Emma Talbot: How We Learn to Love, installation view, Compton Verney, 2025. Photo: Jamie Woodley © Jamie Woodley and Compton Verney.

SC: It is such an interesting choice, to pick this political work out of an artist’s oeuvre usually thought of as beautiful and elegant.

ET: Yes! It’s almost an example of the thing that you wouldn’t choose. The older woman looking away in shame is a strange image for Klimt to have chosen. In Klimt’s painting she was naked, and I thought: “What if the body of the elderly woman was her armour?” I was looking at Roman armour at the time, which usually recreates the torso of a very muscular man, but instead I wanted to use the older woman’s wrinkles and the shape of her body as her armour – things that spoke of her experience. I was also thinking about the Velcro supports that old people use to protect their joints. I want to look at the elderly body as something of wonder rather than disgust. I like my work to be disarming.

SC: In older generations and in ancient times, it was the elderly who were seen as the most important people.

ET: We are an ageing population, but often it feels like older people don’t exist. I believe that we can reimagine the elderly, give them agency. It is something that affects all of us. When I went to Italy after winning the 2019 Max Mara Prize, one of the first things I did was to learn how to use knitting machines. The woman who taught me was an 82-year-old who started one of the most important knitwear companies in the world. She was an incredible role model: very determined, very wise. I realised that I had brought my own prejudice to this project; in Italy, everyone is talking about “nonna” and the wisdom of older women in quite a different way. So many things have been mechanised, but those old crafts really contain wisdom about the cycles of nature.

Emma Talbot: How We Learn to Love, installation view, Compton Verney, 2025. Photo: Jamie Woodley © Jamie Woodley and Compton Verney.

SC: You have previously said that you are interested in permaculture. How does it come into your work?

ET: I had been reading writers like [the American feminist] Starhawk, so when I was in Italy during the Max Mara Prize, I also went to the permaculture site on Mount Etna. I chose somewhere with the most difficult environment for growing plants, because I was thinking about the future as a desolate, post-apocalyptic space, and the volcano seemed quite suited to that. I followed a composting course where we talked about microbiology, and I was fascinated by the microbiological nets that are formed when plant material is moved by weather and lands on different surfaces. We borrowed that system to spread compost heaps across a surface. My interest in permaculture isn’t about wanting to grow a garden myself, but about exploring and understanding the systems.

SC: Permaculture also seems to push against how the world is generally understood, which must have attracted you!

ET: Yes. I started reading Starhawk because she is an activist, and I read other writers such as Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre. I was thinking about acts of resistance that are non-aggressive. Resistance can happen in forms that seem fairly innocuous, but which can really make a difference. Like “seed bombing”, where you throw a ball of earth with a lot of seeds inside into a space and the seeds start to grow there. Plants are disrupting space, but in a non-aggressive way.

Emma Talbot: How We Learn to Love, installation view, Compton Verney, 2025. Photo: Jamie Woodley © Jamie Woodley and Compton Verney.

SC: That reminds me of a quote from one of your works, which I thought was so beautiful. It says: “What if growth came from care and flourished in all directions?”

ET: Yes, it is from the animation I made for Circa (shown on the screen at Piccadilly Circus, London, in 2021). It is about letting in different voices. We talk about growth a lot, but what do we mean by it? The idea that you can never reach something means that you always have to feel a sense of lack. I am aware there is no ideal escape; I don’t want to see nature as a pure thing, because we have already corrupted it. If we change the narrative from humans being the destroyers, being somehow outside of nature, and instead see ourselves as being a fundamental part of it, I wonder if we can allow nature to flourish. My work is very much rooted in what is happening today, even if it is imaginative. You have to work with what there is and find a way through.

SC: Are you worried that we are losing some of our touch with the magical, with our digitalised society and the way we consume information on social media?

ET: Not necessarily. Social media allows such a wide range of ideas, including different ways of looking at the world, and at its best it is a space for sharing and connection. But I do think that there is a lot of knowledge of the natural world that I didn’t learn about when I grew up. There is space for us to reignite that knowledge.

Emma Talbot: How We Learn to Love, installation view, Compton Verney, 2025. Photo: Jamie Woodley © Jamie Woodley and Compton Verney.

SC: You are incredibly prolific, making giant installations, showing works around the world. Do you have a team? And how do you relax?

ET: I have a very small team – two assistants – who help me with practical jobs like stitching. I like to do all the drawing and painting myself. In the past, I taught and I brought up two children by myself, but now I get to make my work full time, and it is what I want to do. In between, I try to relax as much as I can. It is the little things, like choosing to sit here on a bench, talking to you. Outside in nature.

• Emma Talbot: How We Learn to Love is at Compton Verney until 5 October 2025.