LONDON.- This July, British artist Emma Hart presents Dirty Looks, a series of new sculptural works combining ceramics, photography and video. The exhibition runs at Camden Arts Centre from 26 July until 29 September 2013 and admission is free.

Emma Hart does not make art that tries to make sense of the world. Rejecting the contemplative environment of the gallery space, she makes work that captures the confusion, stress and nausea of everyday experience. For Hart, there is a divide between the overwhelming chaos of reality and the way the video or photograph smoothes it out. Central to her work is a determined frustration with the limits and restrictions of the lens. Through sculpture she corrupts digital images and spatially infects videos, ‘dirtying’ the images and squeezing more life out of them. Hart’s unexpected meshing of materials results in work that is raw, detailed and fractured.

Hart’s practice often draws on her own embarrassment. Reflecting on her experience of working in a call centre, Dirty Looks serves up a cacophony of noise, imagery and ceramic objects. Chipboard cupboards with lopsided drawers, agitated service industry supplies and a homemade water cooler litter the space. Discomfort manifests itself in crudely made ceramic tongues, pulling open doors, choking on stationery. At once internal and external, the junction of private and public, the tongue here evokes disgust, humiliation. Each work competing for attention pulls the audience through the charged environment, as coughing, mobile ring tones and chatter add to the confusion and unease of the space.

Emma Hart: Dirty Looks is showing at Camden Arts Centre at the same time as an exhibition of work by Swedish artist Jockum Nordström.

Emma Hart lives and works in London and has presented solo exhibitions and performances in galleries in the UK and internationally. These include: M20 Death Drives, Whitstable Biennale, Whitstable (2012); To Do, Matt’s Gallery, London; Outpost, Norwich and CIRCA Projects, Newcastle (2011/12); Word Processor, Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston (2012), Jam, Cell Project Space, London (2011). She received an MA in Fine Art from the Slade in 2004 and recently completed her PhD in Fine Art at Kingston University. Hart was resident at Camden Arts Centre with The Questions Department in 2009 and for The Forest residency at Wysing Arts Centre in 2012. In 2012 her first in the series of Monuments to the Unsaved was exhibited when she was shortlisted for the Jerwood / Film and Video Umbrella Awards.