Emilie Syme-Lamont is an Australian artist currently based in Budapest. She recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Drawing from the National Art School in Sydney.
Emilie’s interest lies in the fallible and obscured areas of memory that inform how past material can influence present and future narratives of the self. This series speaks to her fascination with objects that are at once personal and cultural.
I. That Goldfish Myth
- No matter common conceptions
- we aim to make their lives
- interesting
- poor captives
- difficult to see for its difference
- bubbled breath – humming, disturbing the water
- in its ticklish desperate way.
II. A Collection of Things as They Seemed
- All assembled, a distinctive dossier of us
- emerges
- written with light as if light
- could penetrate stone
- transform pets and party dresses
- into things fixed –
- remembered and revered as Tablets of Law
- then later,
- bloody historians revise.
III. Rearranging the Furniture
- When you take the S.N.C.F
- from Lourdes to Bordeaux
- the carriages cleave apart like magnets
- suddenly repelled
- for divergence of direction on a sick tilt
- unmoored
IIII. Past continuous
- A mood most skilled in
- acrobatics – requires tension –
- slacklines suspended
- above and
- below
- the plot
- of each tale and
- show
- Come curtain call
- ovation, continuous
By Eleni James. James is a writer living in Melbourne. Her work explores interior geographies and the construction of personal mythologies.
Image: Young Americans II2019, oil on canvas, 40 x 52 cm
