EMALIE BINGHAM
(b.1987 Cape Town, South Africa)

Emalie Bingham was born in South Africa, where she trained as an artist and exhibited for ten years before relocating to the UK in 2019. This exposed her to a widened variety of sociopolitical, psychospiritual, and design perspectives within a new environment, further shaping and expanding her creative practice.

“My work is centred around emerging and shifting patterns of transformation, connection, and possibility. Both technically and conceptually, I seek to deconstruct and subvert binary paradigms, towards an alternative narrative of fluidity, possibility, and inclusion. I create, collect, dismantle, and redesign marks as symbols, developing a system of abstract signs through form, material, and process. This particular visual alphabet consists of offcuts, incidental strokes, and more intentional, repetitive explorations of personally significant objects. The compositions impose a kind of visual ‘dyslexia’, requiring imaginative readings beyond familiar patterning of ‘language’, and so what each mark represents may depend on interpretation. The emergent abstract designs pose questions and open dialogue around notions of framing, visibility, belonging, transition, chaos, deviance, and perception.”

Playfully juxtaposing, layering, and collaging marks as repeating motifs, Emalie explores endless possible outcomes, and considers a re-writing of normative attitudes towards grouping, orientation, and order. This improvised act of deconstructing and re-patterning recurring forms is inextricable from the concepts represented by each mark and evolving design. The woven, encrypted shapes may act as windows into the neuroqueer experience, where thought, emotion, environment, and identity intersect, dissolve, and transform simultaneously on a single plane. These neuroqueer sensibilities implicit in her work create conceptual continuity between projects that may otherwise appear visually disparate.

Alongside her artistic practice, Emalie is a support worker for people with learning disabilities. To decompress, reflect, and generate ideas, she takes long walks in nature or through the city, and has a regular embodiment practice. Discussion within her local inclusive faith community in Bristol, as well as within her wider creative network, often provides a departure point for innovation in her practice.

Bingham completed her Fine Arts degree at Rhodes University in South Africa. Her work is represented in the Nando's and the Spier art collections and in many other private collections in South Africa and around the world.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:

2021
Summer 2021, Everard Read, London, UK

2020
Against Interpretation, Everard Read, London, UK

2019
SUMMER, Everard Read, London, UK
Southern Aspect - A Group Exhibition, Everard Read, London, UK

2018
Summer Show, Everard Read/Circa, Cape Town, South Africa
Unimagining, Everard Read/Circa, Cape Town, South Africa
Summer Show, Everard Read, London, UK
Investec Cape Town Art Fair, AVA Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

2017
Summer Salon Show, AVA Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Moving Still, AVA Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Summer Show, Everard Read/Circa, Cape Town, South Africa
Winter Show, Everard Read/Circa, Cape Town, South Africa

2016
Surface/Subtext, Everard Read/Circa, Cape Town, South Africa

2015
Summer in the City, Everard Read/Circa, Cape Town, South Africa
Broken Monsters, Cape Town, South Africa
Homage, Everard Read/Circa, Cape Town, South Africa
Winter Show, Everard Read/Circa, Cape Town, South Africa
Empire, Everard Read/Circa, Cape Town, South Africa

2014
Art on Paper, Kalk Bay Modern, Kalk Bay, South Africa

2013
Surface Interest, Town Hall / Long Table Pop-up, Grahamstown, South Africa
One in a Million, Salon 91 Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Line&Light Collective, One For Another, Cape Town, South Africa
The Benediction of Shade, David Krut Projects, Newlands, South Africa
Too Muchness not Enoughness, Pretoria, South Africa
Forts – Let there be Light, Cape Town, South Africa

2012
I’d Rather Be Swimming, Salon 91 Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Sacred Lakes / Crooked Brooks, Bronze Age Art Foundry, Cape Town, South Africa
Flower Safari, Let There Be Light, Cape Town, South Africa

2011
Strata, Greatmore Studios, Cape Town, South Africa
Independent Publishing Project, Blank Projects, Cape Town, South Africa
Long Table Exhibition, Town Hall / Long Table Pop-up, Grahamstown, South Africa
Absa L’Atelier, Ann Bryant Art Gallery, London, UK

2001
Sculptors and the Animal, Museums of Fukushima, Kirishima, Yamanashi and Mie, Japan
Salon Artuel, Beirut, Lebanon