The resulting indeterminacy of these ‘paintings’, the real and the artificial, the hand and machine made, the found and the crafted generates an alternate reality, Twin Peakian, boundary-crossing sensibility which defies ready categorisation. This tension is reinforced with her careful and slow replication in paint of the patterns in the resin marbling, originally created by chance and in an instant.

The title Vanity Factory is a line from a pop song by Elvis Costello describing the Elizabeth Arden makeup factory where he once worked. A vanity is of course a piece of furniture and Vanitas a genre of still life painting. With the bathroom a site for cleaning and preening, Hartley-Skudder\'s ambiguous objects contain multi-layered references to issues related to the body, the presentation of the body and art, recycling and collecting. Amy Weng has written: If still lives are often about the transience of life and pleasure, Hartley-Skudder’s are a vision of plastic immortality, where the female body is trapped within the machine of resplendent consumption.

Underlying these often amusing interplays is also a concern with the gendered nature of both the domestic realm and art history itself. As Kate Powell has observed: Within the realms of Emily Hartley-Skudder’s artwork, there is power in pastel and fortitude in femininity.

Bio

Emily Hartley-Skudder (b. 1988, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a visual artist living in Pōneke Wellington. Hartley-Skudder graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury in 2012. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Aotearoa and internationally, including at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Gus Fisher Gallery, The Dowse Art Museum, Hastings City Art Gallery, The Suter Art Gallery, and a solo project with Christchurch Art Gallery’s Outer Spaces in 2013. She was the Wellington Asia Residency Exchange (WARE) recipient for 2018, which took her to China for three months, sparking a use of new materials. Hartley-Skudder has also participated in shows in Japan, Australia, and multiple exhibitions in New York City, USA.

Artist statement

My work indulges in the artificial ordinary and the faux domestic – think life-sized dolls houses, carpeted bathrooms and fake flowers; or a re-constructed memory of an interior that never existed. Decorative and ‘stock’ images are unashamedly drawn upon, suggestive of a kind of nostalgic commodification.

I enjoy combining the peculiar with the banal, blurring what could be suspiciously pleasant or anatomically suggestive. With their quaint objects and ‘delightful’ colours, my paintings become doubles: domestic scenes perfect for the domestic space, signalling the often unavoidable role of paintings as décor. Alongside inescapable art historical references, I hope to mix ingredients of humour, feminism, taste and desire, perhaps offering a playful subversion of a historically male-dominated art world.