BRISTOL.- Arnolfini, Bristol’s centre for international contemporary arts, presents British artist Emma Talbot’s latest exhibition Everything is Energy this autumn, 18 October 2025 to 8 February 2026. Through vast silk painting installations, intimate drawings, sculptural forms (which the artist refers to as ‘intangible beings) and animation, Talbot creates immersive environments that explore our relationship with nature, technology and one another.
Talbot’s latest body of work captures the pulsating force of the exhibition’s title Everything is Energy, as it gathers and grows, scooping up myths, objects and provocations and creating a container and ‘tool that brings energy home’.
Steeped in folklore and mythology her work playfully takes audiences both back and forth in time, embracing ancient civilisations and a future dictated by scientific and technological developments. Building like a ball of energy, Talbot’s existential enquiries pull at the frayed edges of our consciousness, encircling both deeply personal concerns and universal anxieties that address how we live in the world today. As Talbot states:
“There isn’t an action that doesn’t have some kind of impact on another thing, because that’s what we’re experiencing. Life is an accumulation of actions, and in that sense, energy moves through us. We’re full of energy in order to live… It’s a really good way of explaining and of thinking about what life is.”
At the heart of the exhibition stand two major works co-commissioned by Arnolfini and Copenhagen Contemporary, the eponymous Everything is Energy and Are You a Living Thing That Is Dying or a Dying Thing That Is Living? These monumental paintings on silk transform the gallery space into a living ecosystem, in which visitors can wander freely making connections and creating their own non-linear journeys through the work.
These installations – as with many of Talbot’s work across the years – are richly populated with unanswered questions. Handwritten text bubbles float across jewel-like images, asking: ‘What is life?’ and ‘Are you part of an illusion or are you the dreamer?’, and ‘What can you gather before you retreat?’, queries that Talbot is posing to herself and, by extension, to us all.
An urgent vein that runs throughout these questions (and works in the exhibition), is Talbot’s growing response to the current moment of climate emergency, ecological collapse and technological disruption. In the work Everything is Energy, Talbot imagines a future where humans live isolated in sterile pods, surrounded by artificial intelligence, gaming consoles and surveillance cameras, completely cut off from the dying natural world outside. It's a vision that feels uncomfortably close to our present reality.
But Talbot doesn't offer only despair. In Are You a Living Thing That Is Dying or a Dying Thing That Is Living?, she presents both sides of existence – death and rebirth, darkness and growth. One panel shows the nocturnal world of endings,
while the other bursts with life and possibility. The work suggests that even in destruction, there's potential for renewal.
Tellingly, after receiving the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2020, Talbot reassessed the sustainability implications of her practice, integrating her environmental awareness directly into her creative process by considering both transportation emissions and material sustainability when making new work.
At the heart of this increasingly environmentally concerned practice, which combines word and image with seamless ease, lies a dedication to the intimate practice of drawing. Examples of which can be seen sitting alongside her monumental installations throughout the exhibition, providing quieter moments of reflection. Following profound personal loss in 2006, Talbot was left reconsidering her artistic career, yet she found herself compelled to keep on drawing, seeking to capture the emotions that words could not reach. These initial sketches gradually developed into the elaborate installations she now creates.
Appearing throughout these, often immersive, works is a female form which, serves as an autobiographical presence that journeys through alternately sublime and troubled environments. Talbot describes this figure as an internal self-portrait rather than a physical likeness, representing her inner emotional landscape: “It's how I feel from inside." This figure also weaves its way throughout her increasingly ambitious animations, including her newest work You Are Not the Centre (Inside the Animal Mind), in which Talbot reconsiders our relationship to the animal kingdom, disappearing inside the body of both domesticated and wild creatures.
For all its provocations and cumulative force Everything is Energy also invites audiences to slow down, to question and to reconnect. In a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence and digital mediation, her work offers a reminder of our fundamental connection to the natural world – and to each other.
Emma Talbot (born 1969) has exhibited extensively across Europe, including at Museum Hundertwasser, Vienna; Kesselhaus Kindl, Berlin; Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway and Whitechapel Gallery, London. Her work was featured in The Milk of Dreams at the Venice Biennale in 2022. She currently lives and works between London and Reggio Emilia, Italy and is represented by Galerie Onrust, Amsterdam.
Everything is Energy is complemented by a new publication including texts by Emma Talbot, Aukje Ravn Lepoutre, Gemma Brace, Jennifer Higgie and Gina Buenfeld-Murley exploring Talbot's unique approach to making, as both personal exploration and urgent social commentary. Available to buy from Arnolfini Bookshop from 18 October.
The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of workshops, live events, family activities, community gatherings and tours for visually impaired audiences, delivered in collaboration with Arnolfini’s creatives in residence and community partners.
