Following sources of philosophy, science and culture, Emily Wardill recomposes text and image material from the history of ideas--such as the motives of medieval church windows or theoretical treatises from Ruskin to Rancière--and develops a many layered and intense meshwork of autonomous statements and concepts. Her work is concerned with strategies of communication and the implicit connection between the structure of a language and the media conversion of the pre-existent text and image material.

In Wiesbaden, Emily Wardill presented herself with a selection of her 16mm videos. With an almost magical pull, the artist enthrals the spectator in details and recesses of complex interrelations, combining music and speech with a syntax of absence in sound and vision.

Wardill’s technique follows the principles of a collage with playful but strict rules of composition. In her films she quotes finds of the real world and underlays and expands them with speech specific elements. The films’ music, composed by Wardill herself, plays symmetrically mirrored after a strict score reminiscent of Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique.

Based on one single metaphor, one carefully chosen motif, Wardill plays with the sensuous possibilities of filmic narrative. With the surging social and psychological implications, she pulls the spectator into an intense tableau vivant. The expectation of a complex overall meaning is fed by hidden leads and encoded clues for possible interpretations: The visitor’s perception is wooed along a labyrinthine path of intellectual seduction.