The Sky Swallowed a Stone
Solo exhibition at UNSW Galleries, 29 August - 16 November 2025. Install photos: Jacqui Manning. Artwork documentation: Document Photography.
A stone is struck. A mark is made. A surface buckles as another takes shape.
'The Sky Swallowed a Stone' traces Emma Fielden’s evolving body of work with silver and stone, where painting, drawing and performance converge through acts of impact, connection and transformation.
Working across disciplines, Fielden engages elemental materials to explore the memory of matter and how gestures leave enduring, if metamorphic, traces. Her practice is grounded in repetition and change, where nothing is fixed, and everything remains open.
In a new series of paintings, crushed stone and silverpoint are suspended in oil glaze. Each surface becomes a site of slow doing and undoing, of crystallisation and unfolding. Pressed into layers and caught in motion, the materials remain in flux. Their alchemy is quiet and slow—a still becoming.
This new body of work reaches back to Dialogue 2020, a durational performance in which a limestone boulder is rhythmically struck with hammers. Stone becomes a material that bridges time and distance, embodying the complex weight of geological and human histories and interactions. What remains is presented here: the boulder and its rubble, video documentation, and two large photographs that capture wall drawings made during the performance as fragments flew from rock to wall. Like the paintings, these remnants hold a trace of what passed through them—impulse, rhythm and the slow insistence of return.
Sound moves through these works like an undertow: percussive, breath-bound, reverberant. It lingers not only in the recordings but in the surfaces themselves—in the rhythm of impact, the whisper of breath, and the quiet weight of transformation.
