In our project space, Emma Fielden exhibits a body of work entitled Dark Matter. Through her drawing, sculpture and installation works, Fielden investigates notions of the infinite and the infinitesimal, and systems of belief that surround them. In her ongoing exploration of these themes, Fielden works through materials such as black pigment, hand-crushed ferrite, magnets and ink on paper, in such a way that materiality is a metaphor for matter at its most minute. 

Mapping the Void is a site-specific installation filling one end of the space. Tiny mountains formed from smashed ferrite magnets and black pigment emerge from the floor and are invisibly connected to lines of thread drawn from above. 

The series of work titled Veil is concerned with tracing that which cannot be seen. The artist arranges magnets in grid formations upon which she scatters particles of black iron oxide pigment. Through this act of covering, an invisible magnetic field is brought to light, its pattern, form and dimension revealed.  

Fielden’s repetitively handwritten text drawings, often made over long periods of time, engage with ideas of prayer, devotional acts, obsession, longing and awe. In her work Infinite, Fielden draws on the Christian origin of the triptych, supposing that it is awe and a fear of the infinite that brought humanity to create systems of religious faith. Each drawing is a decimal expression of one third, an infinitely repeating decimal. They are starscapes, white noise, an abyss. Relics is a series of drawings where Catholic prayers are scribed by hand in dogmatic repetition, overwritten until they can no longer be read. They are at once blind faith, a palimpsest and an act of erasure. Zero + Nothing is a pair of drawings, infinity’s twin, words repeated and meditated on, form emerging, mapping the void. 

— Dominik Mersch Gallery, 2016