Hinterlands Series ‘Stay’ catalogue

Text written by curator Cherry Smith 2005

On a Sunday morning in 1967, Ed Ruscha flew over movie studios in Hollywood to take aerial photographs of their empty parking lots. Like mappings of routine and convenience, patches of engine oil showed which parking spots were the most used - all those nearest to the entrance of the building. These photographs of black spills were pictures of labour, time, machinery and its little failures.

Emily Cole’s paintings remind me of Ruscha's ‘34 Parking Lots in LA’. Ruscha’s images presented the utterly familiar in a previously unseen way. Cole too, is interested in making the unnoticed register and resonate in a way it hasn’t done before. Working from digital photographs taken from a train, she chooses an image in which the composition of the ‘view’ says something about transience, travel and looking at landscape. She usually works from an intensely bright ground - fluorescent orange and pink for the neon cityscape and a lush green or pungent turquoise for the rural landscape. In her paintings, the ground really matters. What is often hidden or minimised is gloried in as she welcomes the seepage of lurid ground into the narrative, making us question what elements should be focused on or studied as ‘view’.

In this series, ‘Hinterlands’, Cole records the train journey from Norwich to London, once the main line of the Great Eastern Railway formed in 1862. Her palette reflects the changing landscape and mood as the urban recedes and the view becomes semirural. The sequence begins with a dense black and orange painting of the platform at Liverpool Street Station, showing an empty, expectant train, its doors hanging open. The image is packed with a sense of imminence but we’re unsure why exactly - it is more than just the half-open doors: is it the orange buffers at the end of the track under the low dark station roof? Or the passenger moving off left and the digital clock frozen at 12:30.29? The image offers the immediacy of travel, being taken elsewhere. It’s vibrant with the thrill of departure. There is a distortion of time - this is a snapshot but it took time to paint - the freeze frame recorded exactly in that moment becomes an elastic fraction of a second travelling through time in the painting and in the viewer’s mind.

This is what Cole’s work does - takes an urban railway station, a place we rush to leave, and makes a fleeting image hold. She creates a quick gestural brushstroke and gives it body and depth. She captures transience - the slight blur of movement and a loss of bearings, until the paintings contain you, give you a place.

Cole uses acrylic like watercolour, reinvigorating the landscape tradition and giving some of the works an underwater feel - like the group of railway signalmen standing on the sidings. It’s a murky and gritty suburban scene. The edge of the track cuts a diagonal through the right-hand corner of the image, going on somewhere else, leaving these workers, this view behind. The industrial cables, brackets and boxes lend perspective and control to the composition. The postures of the three men are casual yet concentrated - one has the proprietorial air of a foreman, leaning slightly forward, while another seems to have his hands in his pockets, his weight on one bent knee. Cole makes us pause in a richly gloomy wasteland we would normally ignore. The platform where the men stand seems to be awash, a river of blue-green-grey, as if the whole landscape is moving as the train and we, the viewer/passenger, stay still. Like much of Cole’s work, it’s both melancholy and robust. It’s loose and considered. She deromanticises the pastoral and makes the dismissed urban appealing.

Most of us now experience the countryside as a snatched view from the car or window of a high-speed train or from media images. Cole takes the incidental - the smudge of dark wet on the tarmac, a functional yellow signalbox and makes it shine. As American photographers like Robert Frank invented a visual iconography from American freeways and gas stations, so Cole creates a new British iconography out of what is overlooked on the way to somewhere else: the non-spaces of warehouses, derelict sheds, deserted sidings, reminiscent of the Belgian school of Luc Tuymans and Koen van den Broek, and the underground carpark and factory floor paintings of German painter Magnus von Plessen. What was perceived as ugly or banal is rendered emotionally engaging and we look again to locate what it is that has caught us off-guard, like a memory you didn’t know you had. She refreshes our lazy habit of not looking.
As a train moves into empty space and greenery, our eyes adjust and in Cole’s paintings of the rural landscape, the apple green ground leaks into the carriage itself, expanding the light and giving the effect of staring into open fields. There’s that sense of expectancy again, of time slowed down. The empty seats. The table with a newspaper on it. The sky seems daubed with café au lait brown as if raw earth is reflected in it. The train windows echo TV screens and the movie of the landscape plays outside. The frame reminds us that this is a mediated image, taken from a digital photograph and reframed within a painting. The train reaches Manningtree, with its lake, or estuary, its smoke stack, its warehouses and silos. But no hard lines. Only soft buttery strokes that make our gaze soft, the view loved. The mood is jaunty now. She’s teaching us how to measure a skyline, reconsider the sublime. These are diaristic, rushed and anti-sublime paintings, but there’s a reaching spirit in them that is optimistic and non-judgemental. Her approach seems informal but there’s a pleasing symmetry of line and form. The fenced railings echo the direction of the track as does the overhead cable. There’s an inevitability of destination, the suspense of arrival. This is sensuous, unfussy painting that celebrates the ordinary and makes the garish gleam with a surprising beauty.

Cherry Smyth 2005