Emily Crookshank | Against the Hurricane

- Nan Shephard

'Against the Hurricane' is the summation of two years’ worth of work, during which time Emily has left London to settle in the wilderness of the Cairngorms. This settling, though, is no act of complacency. In removing herself from the city and the myriad demands it makes of us, by relocating herself and her practice to the mountainside, with its stillness and grandeur, its disregard and harmony, Emily has been able to look, properly and deeply, within. While her work is clearly not a depiction of her surroundings, it is very much the environment that facilitates its creation.
Onto the steel plates, subjected to an open bite of acid which provides a deep tooth to hold the richness of her blacks, purples, greens, Emily makes mark after mark, printing, responding, building layer upon layer in a steady, reflective process that counters the immediacy of the marks themselves. For these marks are nothing more, and nothing less, than the ineffable given form: Joy and rage, anguish and serenity, enacting themselves, emotion transubstantiated into ink. The result is as raw and as poised as the mountains themselves.