Emma Jane Brassington

Curious, absorbed, amazed, naïve, bewildered, disturbed, unnerved and discomforted…I am fascinated by the repetition of daily life.

Repetition that transforms activity into sacred ritual. My work draws from ethnographic devises imersion, observation, participation and informant interviews. I use a wide range of media to interpret, process and explore my experiences of the culture that surrounds me.

At first, repetitive movements appear familiar and insignificant yet put them under a microscopic lens and they shift into an exotic realm: we see the uncanny and the absurd.

Taking the everyday as a subject, the work orbits themes of  identity and it engages with its inherently political and psychological dimensions.

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Key elements of anthropological text inform my work. I consider

Arnold Van Gennep's three stage model of ritual structure: Preliminal, liminal and postliminal phases and Victor Turner provides a useful description of liminality and communitas to understand social collectivity of ritual. The ritual process leads participants through stages that transforms their identities and creates new social bonds. I use these interpretations to observe my surrounding culture: Grooming, brushing teeth and morning commutes. By examining everyday ritual we uncover great mythologies that form our daily experience.

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