Emma Hart’s gorgeous and funny new ceramic works

SUPERSIZED jug-pot heads, tessellated windscreens and an ominous ceiling fan made out of cutlery. This is the work of Emma Hart, a sometime photographer turned sculptor whose striking, thought-provoking and frequently witty ceramics won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2016. Now she has her first Scottish show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, displaying her prize work and new pieces made especially for the Fruitmarket space.

Ceramics became the expressive medium of choice for Hart a number of years into her post-art school practice. It marked, then, a dramatic change in her focus, after a BA degree in photography and an early career in film.

Fruitmarket curator Fiona Bradley, who was on the jury of the Max Mara prize the year that Hart won, says: “She told me she wanted to make something which would exist as a ‘thing’ in the real world that people could relate to, not just as an object in an art gallery.” It is one of the interesting things about her work, this “direct and democratic relationship between a person and a thing,” as Bradley puts it. And she also, it turns out, just loved the process of moulding clay.

“I knew of her work previously, but it was during the process of judging the Max Mara prize that I saw it close up. The way she talked about her work was fiercely intelligent and exciting. I thought, I don’t care if she wins the prize or not, I want to do a show with her!”