EMMA FIELDEN - DARK MATTER

“Something in our universe is missing, or rather almost everything, most of the matter in existence. Scientists first noticed this in the 1930s, observing that galaxies were moving much faster than expected and at such speeds should have disbursed or evaporated.

They theorised that there must be something as yet unknown keeping the galaxies in place. The Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky, in the 1930s, called this ‘Missing Matter’ at first and later as we know it now, ‘Dark Matter.”

- ‘Dark Matter’, BBC In Our Time (Melvyn Bragg), 12 March 2015.

Through her drawing, sculpture and installation works, Emma Fielden investigates notions of cosmology, the infinite and the infinitesimal, and systems of belief that surround these concepts. In her ongoing exploration of these themes, she works through materials such as black pigment, hand-crushed ferrite, magnets and ink on paper, in such a way that materiality is a metaphor for matter at its most minute.

In her new body of work, Fielden uses magnets and magnetic fields to draw a connection between the once mysterious force of magnetism, and Dark Matter which remains a mystery to us still.

In the series of work titled ‘Terrain’, Fielden uses pigment to trace invisible magnetic fields. She arranges magnets into their inherent grid formations, upon which particles of black iron oxide are placed. In doing so, an invisible magnetic field is brought to light, its pattern, form and dimension revealed.

‘Mapping the Void’ is a site specific installation drawn between ceiling and floor. Tiny mountains formed from smashed ferrite magnets and black pigment emerge from the ground and are invisibly connected to lines of thread drawn from above.

Fielden’s repetitively handwritten text drawings engage with ideas of prayer, devotional acts, indoctrination, obsession, longing and awe. ‘Relics’ is a series of drawings where Catholic prayers are scribed by hand in dogmatic repetition, overwritten until they can no longer be read. They are at once blind faith, a palimpsest and an act of erasure. ‘Zero’ and ‘Nothing’ is a pair of drawings, infinity’s twin, words repeated and meditated on, form emerging, mapping the void.