Emily Orley is an artist, researcher and teacher involved in place-specific installation and live art. In her work she hopes to compel the viewer to recognise the extraordinary qualities of ordinary objects, including their textures and their settings, and to look again at the familiar until what is real can be questioned and reconsidered.
She often collaborates with artists Elinor Brass and Katja Hilevaara. In her work with Brass, they often begin their projects with the idea that ‘places remember events’ (words that James Joyce scribbled in the margin of his notes for Ulysses) to investigate and document the history of sites in and around London.By thoroughly researching the buildings that they decide to use and their surrounding areas, and then working with carefully composed installations and photography, they bring these places to life by tapping into the memory contained within their very fabric. The positioning of the objects they use, as well as the absence of people suggest implied activities and narratives. In her collaborations with Hilevaara, on the other hand, they respond to specific sites by creating fleeting images with commonplace objects, appealing only to whoever happens to be watching at the time.
Emily is currently working as a lecturer at Roehampton University where she recently completed a PhD developing a method of encountering place and place-specific work. She trained in performance and scenography at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, and has degrees from Cambridge University and Wimbledon School of Art.
'Imagination is what makes us absolutely free and, by extension, absolutely responsible'. Richard Kearney
