LONDON.- Martina Larsson is opening British artist Emma Biggs’s Peekaboo over Christmas and New Year at 139 Whitfield Street, W1T 5EN. The installation – a sewn banner -- can be seen through the gallery window at street-level between the 13th of December and 6th of January. Within this period, the gallery will be open on select days for visitors to come in and see the entire work.

Recently diagnosed with a variety of tuberculosis that prevented her from working in the studio, Biggs decided to make a banner with crochet and ecru doilies she had collected over the years, decorative objects that represented the domestic creativity of women, her grandmother amongst them. Sewing was the one activity Biggs was easily able to do in her incapacitated state. Working propped up in bed, cutting holes in a bedsheet and inserting lace doilies, the white needlework and the white sheet suggested ideas about hygiene, purity, health and, by contrast, blood, sickness and decline. The holes and piercings began to seem coy allusions to anatomical details associated with disgust and shame.

The doilies come from different periods but share identical principles: hooks and stitches that create a pattern, comparable to lace. Lace, a material almost exclusively associated with women, holds a plethora of implications. It has coquettish and sexual peekaboo characteristics at the same time as seeming outmoded and to some even off-putting.

Biggs created Peekaboo as one of a series of banners she has made. Some are in private collections; others are held by campaigning organisations. Some concern biodiversity loss, others deal with health, immigration policy and global justice.

The structure of the event – a three-week long installation with a handful of days when the gallery is open to public – made up largely of restricted views from a distance, is intentional and speaks of the attitudes of societies past and present towards women and their objectification. The work has two sides: one an acceptable ‘public’ face we see from the street, and another more gimcrack, scruffier side, where the tucks and nips needed to create the public face are exposed. Biggs wanted the work to act as a sudden punch.

Emma Biggs studied Fine Art at Leeds University at the time of punk. She went on to work for Vivienne Westwood, while her partner worked for Malcolm McLaren. In the 80s she set up a craft-based workshop – Mosaic Workshop -- and made mosaics for clients as various as Prime Ministers, boxers, pop stars, churches, and cathedrals. Her award-winning architectural-scale mosaics have been installed in cities in Europe, the Middle East and the USA – from private houses, to mosques, cafes, churches, restaurants and galleries. She recently developed a lung condition — probably in part from damage from glass and marble dust, so, unable to cut mosaic, she has been making protest banners and hangings. Part memorial, part protest, part consciousness-raising exercises, her banners have been taken on marches, shown in the British Textile Biennale, at The World Transformed, in galleries, and are in private collections in the UK and Germany. One is installed in the office of Global Justice Now.

She is also known for geometric paintings made in collaboration with her partner Matthew Collings. Working under the name Biggs & Collings, their paintings are in collections worldwide.

Martina Larsson & Artists
Peekaboo by Emma Biggs
December 13th, 2023 - January 6th, 2023
Emma Biggs will give a talk which is open to public 3pm, 6th January