'The Game' - Emma Camden 2023 e-catalogue

Emma Camden The Game

19 August – 9 September 2023

All images by Michael McKeagg

NB: all prices are in NZ dollars. Contact the gallery for a price for the whole installation.

The Reichenbach Gambit

Every now and then an artist takes a leap physically and conceptually that utterly redefines their work. Out of necessity, as international supply chains tightened in late 2022, glass artist Emma Camden began to use a new source of raw material. Reichenbach 15% has a much lower rate of lead crystal than is customary for New Zealand glass artists. The new product was technically tricky to work with, requiring moulds which can take higher temperatures. While she struggled initially, once she mastered the technique she found “it has a special sparkle… it was challenging after a long time working with one type of glass but it made me think outside the box”.

The Game, the first exhibition showcasing this new material, is Camden’s most ambitious work to date. In this new, bold work, the individual pieces together form a coherent installation. It is the largest work she's created and a significant new direction. The installation commands the gallery space, showing 26 elements of a chess set representing the gamut of kings, queens, bishops, knights, rooks and pawns who fight out the original game of thrones.

Chess provides a ready-made visual language with its established cast of characters and its age-old choreography of feints and lunges. The cannon fodder pawns march stoically straight ahead, the knights twist and turn, rooks and bishops slice through the melee and the members of the royal families tower over them all.

This battle has already commenced and there have been casualties - 6 pieces are gone, although a full complement of pawns remain. The familiar battlefield of alternating squares has been bleached white. Moves have been made and countered and a decisive end might be in sight, but the protagonists are not the usual ones. It is apparent that one side embodies nature; the other technology. Nature’s champions have been cast with seed pods within, creating organic swirls, waves and incisions. The tech regiments are more clear-cut - rigid, edgy cubes bearing codes and serial numbers.

It is not simply a matter of abstracting the traditional, figurative forms of the individual pieces, an artistic challenge which has been pursued since the very beginnings of chess. Colour and light are also at play. These pieces do not present the mirror-image opposites of the conventional game. They are neither black nor white, but rather straddle a subtle section of the blue/indigo part of the spectrum. Each figure is full of a seductive glow.

Whatever the state of the game here, it does not offer a simplistic, binary reading. Instead it calls for an investment from viewers, complicity even. Chess fanatics love to torment themselves with “problems”snapshots of a game in progress which must be “solved”. The Game also poses a problem: which side are you on?

Emma Camden has been working in an architectural realm for many years, drawing on the nature of glass to reveal and conceal internal and external space. Where so many artists see the medium as a way to explore light, she sometimes seems just as interested in shadow. As played by her, The Game embodies darkness and light, struggle and uncertainty, and perhaps - only perhaps - resolution.

For those in the know………..

1 Nh6 gxh6

2 Bxf6+ Qg7

3 Bxg7+ Kxg7

4 Re3 Kh8

5 Qxc8 Kg8

6 Rg3+ Kh8

7 Qxf8#