Emma Magnusson-Reid
Photo: Melanie Kate Photography
Becoming an artist? I don't think I had a choice in it! Growing up in rural Tasmania offered me an entire world of my own to connect to nature. My home property is nestled inland from Wynyard where our property contains an array of native and introduced fauna and fauna. The dualities and paradoxes I have grown up witnessing having lived closely with the environment in an area that bounders agriculture, monoculture and pristine forest has motivated my practice and thinking. Being a farm kid in the built up 'city scape' is quite odd sometimes. Making art helps me figure out who I am in this world, and the responsibility I have to it.
I think I have a unique perspective on things being the child of an immigrant. My mother, named Birgitta (who is well-loved arts worker here), had studied Art Theory in Sweden and was a trained ceramicist in her previous life in the northern hemisphere, so her artistic knowledge and abilities were of a high level and she embedded that within my life too. She taught me how to sew as a child passing on the cultural norm, however she always encouraged mistakes and creative ideas.
My father, David is a retired educator, farmer and Vietnam War Veteran. He has spent many years as an activist here, and is one of the most fiercely passionate people I know who cares deeply for this island, its environment and the true histories that embody this place. Their passions and support have certainly shaped my path to being an artist. But there was no specific path, more like many encounters with generous and passionate people who have guided me endlessly to where I am, I've just followed my feet with little plan. There are many people I can thank for helping me be where I am today. Trust the process (lol).
Art to me means integrity and connection. Oh and it's not necessarily something to capitalise upon. I hate all the commodification that happens to art, when it becomes a business and is removed from the people, there's little point to it existing when that happens. (Buying a print for a good cause doesn't count though and, supporting living artists is important too!).
I think art is life and life is art... it's corny but if you get it you get it. Even when I'm working jobs away from my practice it's always happening in the background of my mind. It's quite amazing to have a portfolio from my childhood years to now that can show the literal and metaphorical growth and development I have gone through in life. It's like record keeping but it's also means to deal with being a human in a world of chaos and corruption.
Art is peaceful, violent, loving, radical, silent, internal and external. It is beauty and decay, anger and peace, light and dark, living and dead, hard and easy, honest and deceptive, mine and yours, and yours and mine. Plus, everything in between.
My most significant art experience? Oh what a question to ask... there are two experiences actually but I'll only share one... in 2016 my art career hit its peak at the age of 21, even at the time I knew this experience would be uniquely satisfying (I'm still hopeful though maybe its just being 'young' though). I was in my third year of my degree and this guy who was covered in tattoos came into the art school and hung out with us every Wednesday evening. His name was Tim Steiner and he ran a 'program' called 'Tim Time' over the course of 7 months. Now, Tim is actually a 'living work of art' in the literal sense, but also the kindest person and most incredible story teller. If you ever visited to MONA in the years between 2011-2018 ish you would have seen him sitting on a white plinth watching out over the void or perhaps listened to one of his inspiring talks. The skin of Tim's back is the actual canvas of an artwork featuring a giant Virgin Mary with skulls and traditional tattoo iconography 'made' by a big art superstar, and is privately owned. Quite a unique position to hold, he was an artwork that could talk! He has been exhibited all over the world and we were so lucky for him to have been on view on this island let alone work with us. His back skin is to be removed upon his death and preserved along with the pig skins that are part of the same 'collection'. It's in the contracts from the sale of it.
Our sessions with Tim were boundless, we would talk about the most pressing or sensitive topics. There was no planned outcome for what the project would turn into. In the end there were about 16 of us who kept coming along and we decided to put on an interactive, performance art experience. Some strings were pulled for us and we were given the huge green shed at Macpoint to inhabit and transform into everything we were dreaming of. We broke every rule in the book and had a lot of fun. We were a group of unhinged, diverse, energetic, emotional, talented and unstoppable artists. We were sleeping in the shed and living together in the lead up to the show whilst constructing and conceptualising the artworks in the space. I remember the day before the opening Donald Trump was elected as president and we were shaken and worried by that global concern.
The feeling from that event hit a frequency I've never felt before. By the end of the evening, the works had been through a full life cycle from within that shed, from their conception, birth, growth and then death as all the works were destroyed by the end of the one night only show. I won't go into the specifics of the works that lived and died in that shed, but I will say that Tim left the event with another really 'bad' tattoo, haha (he LOVES it, truly). Tim decided not to run the program again as he had perviously done at universities in New Zealand and Switzerland. 'Why would I do it again when this was the best it could possibly have been' he said.
We funded the program from out of a sack of coins that Tim had been saving as he always used cash and never used his coins... I remember taking the sack to the bank to cash out, I think around $800.00 in the end... not bad! I will always treasure this experience and keep sensing the feeling we all shared on that hot and windy summers evening in the big, sacred, energetic shed.
Sawtooth has given me many great experiences! I have been a member for a number of years, donated work to the auctions and have been in the past two members shows (I have also bought some wonderful art at the auctions that I look at every day and love, it's tax deductible, you should buy some too!).
I was also part of the exhibition Flow that was curated by Gallery Director, Zara Sully and Dr. Helen Whitty and most recently in the gallery with the exhibition Accretion, along side Olly Read and Laura Purcell curated by Dr. Karen Hall.
I will be exhibiting and inhabiting the back gallery later in the year where I will install a printmaking studio to work from, and offer workshops from the gallery. My aim has been to engage with Sawtooth more (it can be hard getting to things when living out of town and under a rock) so my project 'Printstallation' (Iteration 1) will quite literally put me in the building for 6 weeks.
The work I have made for Sawtooth's 25th birthday is titled 'A Book to Read to You Loved Ones' and is part of a larger analogue artwork I worked on from 2019 - 2021 consisting of 410 book pages from two copies of the Encyclopaedia of Needlework by Austrian author and needleworker, Thérèse de Dillmont, published in 1884.
The work critiques how women's craft skills and traditions become less and less as the demands on life and and as technology progresses can erode knowledge when skills cease to be passed on. The first copy I collected was $4.00 from the south Hobart Vinnies.
The book contains some of the most beautiful illustrations and plates that demonstrate the textile techniques, none of which I would ever have the time to learn and master within this 21st century rat race. The book itself is inherently a work of 'fine' craft and an object that intersects the crafts of printmaking, drawing and textiles. I have layered 'immediate' or 'crude' craft techniques over the pages to contrast its content, whilst considering the way my life is lived to that of the author and the women who would have read the encyclopaedia for its traditional use 140 years ago.
Biography
Emma Magnusson-Reid is a visual artist from lutruwita – Tasmania, originally from Oldina and now based on the North-East coast of the island. Her practice explores the sensitivities between place, nature and identity, presenting imagined concepts of environmental reactions inspired by the shifting climate and human activity.
Drawing from her Swedish and Tasmanian heritages, Emma's work is both unique and thought-provoking, her ancestries often inform both material and conceptual decision making. She engages with printmaking, mixed-media, installation and experimental sculpture, resulting in a style that is characterised by creating moments of stillness within an active field. Her art combines traditional techniques with contemporary processes, embracing a playful yet serious attitude to the practice of making.
Emma offers reflections of the world, and that of the atmospheres that envelop her. Emma graduated from the School of Creative Arts and Media in 2017, receiving the inaugural Salamanca Arts Centre Emerging Artist Award in Hobart and then went on to receive the Jim Bacon Memorial Scholarship to complete her Honours of Fine Arts in 2020 at the Inveresk campus, where she has since worked in both technical and lecturer roles across the Drawing and Printmaking, Photomedia, and Sculpture and Time-Based Media departments.
Emma has exhibited consistently throughout Tasmania since 2014, accompanied with running workshops in various schools and arts establishments. Most recently she has exhibited at Derwent Valley Arts with the NOWHERE PRINT Collective, was featured in the Burnie Print Prize 2023, exhibited at PRESS West, Queenstown, in anticipation to her forth-coming residency. Her most recent collaboration with Sawtooth ARI was her involvement in the exhibition ‘Accretion’ curated by Dr. Karen Hall in late 2023.
Emma will be working with Sawtooth with her 'Prinstallation' exhibition and project in late 2024. Her studio is located at Beechford, situated between the Five Mile Bluff and Stoney Head conservation areas. This place is where the estuary, ocean and the night sky have become her primary source of inquiry and embrace. Emma is passionate about sharing her practice and skills with her local Tasmanian community.