Emergers

Sculptor Emily Motto and painter John Robertson present new works that oscillate between flat and spatial encounters. The exhibition posits formal abstraction as a counterpoint to the speed of contemporary visual culture – encouraging viewers to slow down and take the time to look (at their own looking).

After sharing a studio at the British School at Rome in August 2025 the artists have been developing works alongside each other over the past year. Working in adjacent studios, they have seen their formal languages naturally entwine - a rhyming of sorts: shapes folding into one another, gestures tracing shared paths, rhythms echoing from one work to the next.

The resulting works reflect this quiet collaboration, dissolving boundaries between painting and sculpture - sculptural paintings and painterly sculptures that demand slow attention.

In fly fishing 'Emergers' are types of artificial fly that imitate a fly transforming from a nymph to an adult dun at the water's surface. Neither wholly of water nor air, at this point in their lifecycle the creatures are between two worlds. The artificial flies of course never fully 'emerge', rather they remain perpetually at the interface, forever at the point of their own becoming.