Emily Floyd - The Outsider

Jessie: For my Image and Text subject have been looking at a Melbourne bassed artist called Emily Floyd. Throughout all her work she uses hundreds of cut out wooden letters, often in piles, or snaking in lines across the floor. Art and Australia Autumn 2006 vol 43 no 3, page 434, had a review of an exhibition she had at the John Curtin Gallery in Perth , late last year. Called The Outsider the installation represented Floyds imaginary view of the city of Algiers, consisting of more than a dozen turned and gilded spires, nearly 200 handmade architectural blocks and thousands of wooden letters. Sentences taken from a novel called The Outsider by Albert Camus (written in 1942) formed a landscape around the city. I dont know much about the novel the work is based on. Apparantly though, Camus was an existentialist, and the book implies two things. One: that the world is a bleak place, one without transcendence, liberation or the hope of escape. And Two: that it is a celebration of the artist as outsider, one who is completely at ease with their place in the world.
The installation was described as "A joyous, hedonistic and life affirming velief in the power of the object and text to express a world of sumptuous beauty, chaos and diversity that must be lived in the present".
I love the way she uses the text, and that it is not always easily read. When the text is spelling out whole sentences it can be viewed from all angles, and may have to be read backwards, and the piles of letters hint at words or conversations, but are all jumbled and don't make sense. One of my favourite pieces is from an exhibition that has just closed in Melbourne and is called 10 Things I Really Care About. It is such a simple but lovely idea. We know she cares about whales, but what else?