By Steffen Francisco
The art world today is marked by the burden of the artist to affect change on the greater world around them. Every piece of art made has to have a Meaning with a capital "M", it has to, in the words of Ghandi, be the change the artist wishes to see in the world. Not all artists choose to aspire to such lofty goals, however. Emma Powell is an artist that explores her own mind, her fantasies, dreams and ideas. Her artwork is stunning and haunting, it stays with you after viewing it and makes you want to see more. All without needing to have overtones of political change, women's rights, gender identity or whatever other cause is in vogue at the moment.
Powell has several bodies of work that she constructs over years of creation, each a fully explored dissertation on the subject contained therein. Her current work, Svala's Saga, is a collaborative series illustrating a wholly original fairy tale. The artists use a combination of photographic processes together referred to as "pigment over palladium" to give the images an otherworldly fae feeling without tying them to a single historic era where one or the other of the individual processes would be found.
What draws me to this artist and her work, aside from the pure beauty of it, is the feeling of whimsy and exploration. Powell seeks to understand her own mind and how it works. Another of her series, In Search of Sleep, recreates the wild adventures of the kind of stories her father would tell her as a child before bed. These are not always sweet images and they are not particularly comforting as a whole, but they do serve to induce a wild, dreamscape mindset where odd combinations of ideas are commonplace and the rules are subverted for the purpose of narrative. These kind of explorations in the realm of art photography, as well as the materials and processes she uses, are what make Powell stand out among photographers.
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