BREATH, SILVER, STONE, METAMORPHOSIS
by Julie Ewington

This essay was first published in 2025 to accompany the exhibition Emma Fielden: The Sky Swallowed a Stone at UNSW Galleries, Sydney.

At first, Emma Fielden’s project seems paradoxical. Two linked bodies of work offer what appear to be monochromes but are not exactly that: large drawings that are breathed into existence as much as drawn by a silver flute; and paintings made from fine thin layers of pigment that were coaxed out of stone.

Breath, silver, and stone are the elements that constitute the core mystery of the transformations wrought here. Fielden’s musical instrument leaves traces of its passing, with the momentary expulsion of the artist’s fleeting breath on the surface of the canvases registered by the flute’s minute silver markings. Once solid stones have been ground into dust and are suspended in oil; transparent in appearance, they were previously opaque.

Do these beautiful objects seem emotionally contained, distant, even magisterial? In fact, they are an embodiment of arduous physical labours, and thus intimately connected with life’s struggles, as well as its joys.

Breath

Fielden’s earliest creative practice, from the age of seven until her early 20s, was being a classical flautist. Playing the flute really well, as Fielden does, requires focused bodily control, particularly of the breath. Making was therefore already somatic, long before Fielden turned to making jewellery, sculpture, installation, video. And when the artist decided in 2023 to make an oversize flute from silver, it was with a material familiar in her adult life as a jeweller; she drew on long knowledge of both instrument and metal. The best flutes are made of silver, prized equally for its resonance and longevity. But Fielden’s giant flute, which is the length of her arms from fingertip to fingertip—“the measure of an embrace”, as she writes¹—is an eccentric child of the two parents, music and silversmithing.

Being silver, Fielden’s flute both makes sound and leaves its mark. From Breath 2024, the recording here, attests to the plaintive notes this flute makes; the two large From Breath 2024 drawings on canvas manifest the repeated circling movements made by the artist with the flute. Tiny silver scrapings mark the canvas, tracing the artist’s body as it circled this square black canvas. (If we look and listen closely, we might be able to exactly track the two—sound and silver.)

This is a nice convergence: silverpoint is an ancient technique, best known for its use by late medieval and Renaissance artists. Not entirely coincidentally in the context of Fielden’s work, which also extends to fine engraving, silversmiths and goldsmiths use fine metal points to mark designs onto metal. Historical silverpoint was always diminutive, but Fielden’s large canvases measure the exact span of her two outstretched arms, a deliberate choice. So, this is a field for action, whether the canvases are on the ground, as they were when Fielden performed the silverpoints into being, or on the wall, as they are now. Stand in front of a From Breath canvas: it will encompass you in its insistent circle, framed by that resolute square.

That square is crucial to Fielden’s proposition; indeed, black squares are central to the inheritance of twentieth century Modernism. One may recall Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square of 1915 or American Ad Reinhardt’s series of (ostensibly) square black paintings made between 1953 and 1967. Yet, here, the uncompromising form of that perfect black square is occupied by Fielden’s reiterated circling silvery sounding movements. We see immediately that these many fine marks were made by repeated action—seven hours in total, one hour each day—when the work was first exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2024.²

Here is breath, a woman’s body, her purpose, fixed lightly in place. It is one feminist manifestation of the paradox of being in the world: the merest breath is caught, transcribed. The square is circled, rather than the circle squared.

Stone

If breath is ephemeral, then stone is the conventional guarantee of permanence. (Set in stone…) For a group of works that Fielden has come to call paintings, she crushed stones into fine powder, dispersing their obdurate unity across extensive surfaces. This calculated perversity replicates traditional pigment-making: painting materials, at least until the mid-nineteenth century, were composed of natural ochres and stones ground painstakingly into dust and combined with a medium, such as oil. These stones were often precious; the finest blue, called ultramarine in Europe because it was sourced ‘beyond the seas’, was made with lapis lazuli from what is now northeastern Afghanistan.

The long history of that glorious deep blue—in European, Persian and Indian art, for example—is too complex to repeat here. Suffice to say that these blues were long prized for the ways that painters used them to summon the sky, the firmament seen as celestial, a use that Fielden honours in her title The Sky Swallowed a Stone 2025. And this is exactly what has happened here: the deep sonorous blue of what seems like the night sky, that infinite extent of the heavens, has been constructed from crushed stone. I said before that these paintings may seem like, but are not, monochromes.

This work, for instance, comprises lapis lazuli and turquoise, and sombre manganese underneath: look closely and you will see flecks of ground stone on the surface. Look even more closely and you may eventually see through the painted layers to the silverpoint drawing underneath, a ghostly presence. Other titles refer to this ghosting more directly; in the smaller Stone Dreams of Cloud 2025, with its malachite, lapis lazuli, and spinel, a glorious blue-green orb hovers somewhere in the sky of the imagination. It becomes ever clearer the longer one gazes at it. I speak of the importance of close looking since these are not pictures, but exercises in the ways this artist thinks with materials, through her body. Thinks about what one sees, about how one may see, in fact, when fine successive layers of pigment both admit and also reject light rays. About why work will be made in certain ways.

And once again, the artist’s own body is in the frame: like the flute she created, the canvas of The Sky Swallowed a Stone is the exact measure of the artist’s outstretched arms from fingertip to fingertip. This logic is continued in the size of some smaller canvases, some of which measure one arm’s length, while Fielden has employed the same bodily ratio, scaled down, for the smaller works.³

Metamorphosis

It is clear by now that Emma Fielden invents processes that adhere to a deliberate and idiosyncratic logic. There are rules here, experiments with paint formulae, for example, which require skill and precision; protocols followed to certain conclusions. But whether Fielden is making drawings with a sounding flute or paintings that combine stone dust with oil, metamorphosis is always engaged. This is a process of transformation. What strikes me, though, is that the substance that Fielden uses is never changed. Rather, the form in which she presents it, in the finished work, is different. Thus, the same silver that constituted the giant flute in From Breath now appears, in minute particles, as deposits comprising a graphic image on the canvas; the once-were-opaque pieces of lapis lazuli or black spinel are transmogrified into a modicum of transparency.

This is not alchemy in the traditional European sense: lead is not transformed into gold. But experienced metalsmiths such as Fielden know a great deal about how materials such as silver and stone may, indeed must, be changed in the artist’s studio; that there is always the potential for change and alteration, rather than simply a set of givens. One lovely painting, titled Somewhere Between Silver and Stone 2024, seems to tremble on the threshold between two states of being. Indeed, the titles of Fielden’s works tell us a great deal; Stone Dreams of Cloud and Cloud Dreams of Stone 2025 are identical in size and are made of the same lapis lazuli, malachite, and spinel, but each has its own longing, its particular desire for change. This is because Fielden recognises the inherent potential for change in her materials, but also the possibility of resistance to her plans for them: she had already discovered that with Dialogue 2020, when the limestone boulder refused to be reduced to rubble. Fielden knows that she works with substances that will make their own way in the world—that matter is ‘vibrant’, to invoke theorist Jane Bennett’s assertion that physical elements are alert, active.⁴ Metalsmiths such as Fielden understand the transformative magic of silver and of the crucible. Indeed, when viewing one gorgeous painting titled Crucible 2025, it appears we are looking down into the open mouth of the vessel, one so deep that it might reach the other side of the earth, as we believed when we were children.

A beginning, before a temporary conclusion

And now the reveal: the starting point for both bodies of work was 2017, when Fielden was gifted materials left in the studio of renowned jeweller and poet Margaret West, who died in late 2014. There were quantities of silver and many pieces of stone: marble—Carrara, Thassos, Azul—granite and slate. West’s work and the example of her practices in making and writing were crucial references for Fielden in her developing practice as a jeweller: she had visited West in her home at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, in 2006, while she was still an undergraduate student.⁵

Fielden let the silver and stone she inherited from West sit in her studio for some years, until she commenced new work in 2023. As we have seen, silver eventually became the inspiration for the oversized flute, but it also furnished a key tool for the silverpoint drawings: Fielden melted down West’s scrap silver for a pebble that she used to make these drawings. The marble joined Fielden’s established conversation with stones: she crushed it, experimenting with its possible uses as pigment. This was radically different from West’s use of marble: she had made brooches from marble squares and stone blocks. The surfaces were painted, sometimes with flowers but also with satisfactorily ambiguous shapes that summoned a cloud, or a pool, or simply the weather—I’m thinking here of the vibrant orange brooch when there is heat ... 2011, ink and paint inscribed onto marble to summon the bushfire season.

Remarkably, Fielden reduced West’s stones to dust, an action not dissimilar to what happened on a larger scale in Dialogue, the endurance performance work where Fielden and her colleague Tarik Ahlip attempted to reduce a boulder to fragments, shown here in a video recording. Eventually, however, West’s marble was discarded, as marble dust is not suitable as a pigment. But that quest led Fielden to lapis lazuli, malachite, Australian turquoise, the rare black spinels. In Fielden’s words, the time taken to ‘listen’ to West’s silver and stones allowed her to discover the best uses and the best inspirations for these materials, which she explored through her master’s degree at the University of New South Wales.⁶ The works titled From Breath, and the suite of paintings that includes The Sky Swallowed a Stone, were undertaken in recognition that a legacy such as West’s comprises not only—or perhaps not most importantly—actual physical materials, but also ways of being and philosophies of making. And even before West, that was so: Emma Fielden speaks to the impact on her conceptions of making of her mother Carmel Fielden’s singing, the art of her great-grandmother Kathy O’Flaherty, and the practice of her long-time flute teacher Diane Berger. All have left indelible legacies.

As a woman artist, Fielden recognises that she is following pathways marked out by women, with a feminist’s openness to learning and understanding, and with gratitude. If these networks of affiliation and attunement, to use a word that Fielden likes, are as open, porous, and reflexive as she hopes, then we will see work in the future by other women artists who take Emma Fielden’s own work as its starting point. This story does not end here.

¹ Emma Fielden, communication with the author, July 2025

² The From Breath suite was developed for ‘Infinite: Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial 2024’, Art Gallery of New South, Sydney, 14 September 2024 – 12 January 2025.

³ Fielden, communication with the author, 7 July 2025.

⁴ See Jane Bennett, Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010. This text was an important source for Fielden during the making of this work.

⁵ Margaret West taught in the Jewellery and Object Design department at Sydney College of the Arts (University of Sydney) from 1979 until her retirement from teaching in 1999. At the time of the 2006 Blackheath visit, Fielden was undertaking an Advanced Diploma of Jewellery and Object Design, at TAFE NSW’s Sydney Institute Design Centre, in Enmore; she and West were in contact many times after that initial meeting.

⁶ Fielden enrolled in a master’s degree at the University of New South Wales in February 2023, completing it in late 2025