Taking silly seriously

Story by Poppy Fitzpatrick.

As an adult, it’s often hard to remember the exact moment the joy of ‘silliness’ became a distant memory. Being silly for silly’s sake suddenly lacks any tangible pay-off and that unreserved sense of childlike wonder becomes significantly harder to grasp. But for artist Emmaline Zanelli, silliness has maintained a purpose entirely in its own right. And enjoying the process of being intentionally playful is just as valuable as any outcome.

Playfulness exudes from Emmaline’s varied artworks, be it a manipulated photograph of a burnt McCain’s pepperoni pizza suspended in a golden sky, or an intricate sculpture of the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) made entirely of ice cream cones. But her unique sense of humour comes layered with insight. The pepperoni pizza has been cooked to ‘absolute crisped-up hell’ representing a universal experience of failure. The model made for AGSA represents her often material-driven practice – in this case, a thousand ice cream cones leftover from a commission that didn’t eventuate.

Embracing the practice of resourcefulness as its own aesthetic, Emmaline produces colourful and unpredictable art, often underpinned by an amusing story of its creation or demise. After immortalising the incredibly detailed AGSA wafer sculpture in a perfectly composed photograph, Emmaline left it unattended in her studio for several days. ‘When I came back to the shed a lot of it had been eaten by mice… So I just decided to give the rest of it to the chickens,’ she says flippantly.

It’s this flexibility of form within photography that originally drew Emmaline to the medium. During her undergraduate study in Visual Arts and Design at Adelaide College of the Arts, Emmaline struggled to choose one major from a list of topics she genuinely enjoyed. A wise tutor suggested she do photography, ‘because then you can do anything you want and just take a picture of it’ – an approach Emmaline carries with her to this day.

‘I find it really liberating that whatever I’m making doesn’t have to be structurally sound or last or be entirely real – there’s a lot of freedom. My shed becomes my own little lab of trickery,’ she says. Much of Emmaline’s photographic work fits more comfortably under the label of ‘lens-based’, given the complex layers of sculpture, styling and design that make each still-life composition so compelling.

Working from her shed studio at her house in Maslin Beach, or ‘Mazzies’ as she affectionately calls it, Emmaline describes her solitary, process-driven practice as almost meditative. Photography allows Emmaline to layer obscure visuals with unusual and often perishable materials, such as food, which can’t be transported and displayed as sculptures. ‘It’s the beautiful, legitimised falsehood of photography,’ she says.

Through Emmaline’s lens, there’s a wonder in the everyday that fosters an interactive relationship between herself, her subjects and her audience. During a residency at Sauerbier House in 2021, Emmaline let her father’s job with SA Water and her brother’s job as a plumber lead her body of work Water Meter Reader. While underground piping seems an obscure maze in which to findinspiration, the project > encouraged her to connect with her dad and brother in a way she never had before.

Emmaline says the same of her recent video work, Dynamic Drills, which won her the commendable Churchie Emerging Art Prize 2022. Over two years, Emmaline created a choreographed video with her grandma exploring memory, family legacy and the relationship between body and machine. ‘It really enriched my relationship with my grandma, and this is something I want to do more of in my work,’ she says.

A long-time member of performance collective The Bait Fridge, Emmaline has also found an empowering sense of community and security in her relationships with other artists. With ten core members, and a number of others coming and going, The Bait Fridge has created a network that scatters throughout Adelaide – with a handful based on the Fleurieu. The artists enlist their multi-disciplinary skills to exhibit absurdist performances that combine an improvised mix of music, movement and visual art. The Bait Fridge have performed at galleries, festivals and various public spaces, engaging audiences in their obscure process, using only found or recycled materials – much like Emmaline’s individual practice. Having only been living on the Fleurieu since April 2021, Emmaline says she’s looking forward to observing how the area may influence her future work, while she finds her place as a local. On a morning coffee run to Goodness at Aldinga, she was surprised when a staff member recognised her from a Bait Fridge gig the night before, where she had been dressed in a bald cap, painted entirely white with elongated fingers, fangs and contact lenses. ‘It was so awesome that she recognised me,’ she says. ‘And for some reason it just made me think ‘oh, I love this place’.’