Emily Silver

My work commingles the vast array of life’s experiences which are amplified through textures, colors, and layered methods of creating. My pieces invade the playful spaces found in contradictions, reflecting the awkwardness and complexity of life’s adult moments.

Felting and weaving are the most intricate and exciting media I have found to dive headfirst into the wreckage of my own personal narrative, refracting the various bits of bad TV and Lisa Frank, to composite personal and cultural traumas, to hoarding (individual and systemic), heartache, breakups, body issues, and virtual personae. I incorporate both digital and analog, using everything from animation to textiles; it is here that I embrace opposition and celebrate the marriage of disappointment in play and the embarrassment of the 'girly', elevating a conversation of what these spaces hold.

As an artist, I grapple with holding all of these elements simultaneously. The work vibrates in an opulent state and demands of its audience to consume excess. It showcases the inconsequential and un/monumental with reference to hoarding, while staging its sacredness and sadness; it uses the profane as a means to communicate, and mourning as a form of understanding the human condition.