_100 days : EMILY BATES

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100 Days

During her residency with MMCA Seoul / Changdong, supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Emily began a deep research phase into the spiritual and physical landscape of the mountains surrounding Seoul, where language and sound intrinsically exist and reveal their bond and core. She attempted to unravel this soundscape by reading and experiencing through the mountains and the body in her own 100 Days of meditation.

Photographic series such as 100 Days and On the Shamans Path document walks within the mountains and to various temples and places of worship surrounding Seoul, attempting to reveal contrasts and histories of conflict between the material world and that of the spiritual domain, as well as the role of the mountains themselves as shelter and altar, where you will also stumble upon old bunkers and outposts.
Emily Bates makes repeated visits to chosen locations to enable the evolution of works which speak of time and intimacy, of space, and a moving stillness. Something authentic and specific to each location glimmers within her works, yet they are layered with a personal reading, experience or association. A conversation plays out as a whisper or a song. She enters the dynamic and captures a ripple or a rumour from within the landscape and community. Through the revealing of spaces and gaps between association and action, she reinterprets the landscape in relation to histories of place, but also the personal moment of being and intuitively discovering for oneself.
As she steps in, creating her own pilgrimage, she joins the rhythm of a place: whether shadowing the Teuroteu music of the lonely elderly Korean walker; following a Buddhist chant or a Shaman ritual ringing out from within the mountains; or being guided by the raven and the wild boar.

The research is evolving into a multi layered project of photography, audio, video and installation elements, with subsequent visits to Seoul being made.

Included within group exhibition

Avant Gardener

Featuring Emily Bates, Anthea Bush, Christina Della Giustina and Servet Koçyigit

Curated by Naz Kocadere

puntWG Amsterdam September 2020

Text extract:

With such rocky and reversing terrain, seasons persevere and nature transforms itself anew, but also into certainty. Keeping Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016) close at hand, Avant Gardener delves into interwoven matters around frontiers and borders, botany, spiritual presence, interspecies cooperation and kinship. The artists in this exhibition explore the transitory phases between natural and cultural landscape presented in forms of drawing, installation, photography and audio-visual documentation of sonic work.

Capturing her research around intimately observed rituals and myths connected to landscape, Emily Bates’ 100 Days photographic series narrates meditation practices through scenes of stillness with hidden intricacies. Documenting a shaman temple on the coast of South Korea, the artist follows traces of nature worship, animism, rituals of misfortune and how these traditions navigate around power references of water and mountains. Bates partners her photography with five flags of colored silk hung on the wall that refers to the Korean shamanic ritual “Obansinjanggi.” The banners of the guardian gods are used in divination and the colors are associated with five directions according to traditional cosmology: blue is for the east, misfortune and distress; white is for the west, the Cheonsin (Celestial God) or blessing for the dead; red for the south, and good fortune; black for the north, symbolizing death; and yellow for the center, which stands for one’s ancestors.

The exhibition is entitled by a mischievous wording attempt of a song* that not only discusses gardening as a way to escape one’s own thoughts, but also portrays the familiar sentiments around deprivation based upon unusual circumstances. Living in troubling times with unjust patterns of both pain and joy, Haraway indicates that the task should be to make kin by means of inventing connections to practice learning how to live and die well with each other. Sticking with such difficulties, she adds, requires learning to be truly present. As a way to hold one’s ground, the artists look into interrelations of representation, kinship and spirituality.

*Avant Gardener by Courtney Barnett
The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas, 2013