Troy Emery
Troy Emery
(b. 1981, Roma, Queensland. Lives and works in Melbourne)
Troy Emery’s art practice combines sculpture, painting and drawing. He primarily works with textiles and sculpture, creating animal-like forms that examine the discourse surrounding fine art, craft and the delineations between the two.
At nearly three metres high, Mountain climber, 2022, commissioned by the NGV, is Emery’s most ambitious work to date. The exuberant textile sculpture of a feline creature perched atop a gallery plinth is a continuation of his work exploring humankind’s relationship with animals and their historical representations in museums and in taxidermied form. In Mountain climber, brightly coloured pom-poms are assembled and pinned over an underlying form to create a large-scale and abstracted animal-shaped mass. Emery refers to the display of taxidermy animals in the natural history museum setting as ‘tokens of ecological ruination’, with their display often signalling their demise. Emery says, ‘The animal body removed from the context of nature, the wild world being brought inside, is an analogy for the natural world being somehow diminished’.
Emery’s work is held in various private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Artbank Australia Collection, City of Townsville Art Collection, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery Collection, Deakin University Art Gallery, Macquarie University Art Gallery, Maitland Regional Art Gallery and Bundaberg Regional Gallery. He is represented by Martin Browne Contemporary in Sydney.
Hear Troy Emery discuss his work Mountain climber, commissioned for the NGV as part of the Melbourne Now exhibition. Emery primarily works with… Read more