There really are animals everywhere…
Christina Jansen visited Emily Sutton at home in York ahead of her November exhibition Animals Everywhere, and it quickly became apparent that the title could hardly be more appropriate. Emily’s dog Mouse was our companion throughout the conversation, while animals appeared all around us in Emily’s work, her books and the objects that fill her home and studio.
Animals have always been central to Emily’s visual world. She describes herself as much more naturally an “animal person” than a people person, and even when the subject is a busy city street, her eye instinctively finds the dogs at pavement level or the pigeons perched on the buildings above. They are never simply added to a composition: they are part of the life of it.
For Animals Everywhere, that instinct has led Emily in all sorts of directions. There are urban and Parisian scenes, countryside subjects, allotments and stable yards populated by horses, goats, dogs, puppies and chickens. Recent illustration projects have fed naturally into the exhibition too, demonstrating the wonderfully fluid relationship between Emily’s work as an illustrator and her independent work as an artist.
One of the surprises of the exhibition is a new series of monochrome embroideries. Emily first returned to embroidery almost as a way of slowing down and occupying her hands, beginning one of the works on a long flight to America. What followed became a group of beautifully observed textile pictures: wild horses, a lion, tiger and bear, alongside a dog in a garden and a cat with kittens.
They also take Emily back to her beginnings. Textile work formed a substantial part of her final degree show at Edinburgh College of Art, and her three-dimensional fabric birds subsequently appeared in World of Interiors and led to commissions from as far afield as America and Australia.
Books remain another constant. Emily talks about the imaginary worlds she discovered through books as a child and how those worlds have become part of her real life as an artist and illustrator. That sense of storytelling remains embedded in her pictures today.
It is also what makes looking at Emily Sutton’s work such a pleasure. The detail is beautifully controlled rather than overwhelming. You can take in the whole image and then allow your eye to wander, discovering another small incident, texture or character. And very often, of course, another animal.
