Art & Design Forum | Emily Hunt

Poppets and Puppets: Articulations of Analog and Animistic Intelligence with Emily Hunt

Emily Hunt creates ornamental, figurative ceramics. Her history as a rare book dealer has informed her encyclopaedic approach to her art making. Through drawing, painting, etching, and ceramics, Hunt investigates the visual technology of magic in its symbolic form and how magical symbol and ornament are one and the same thing. She examines how the three elements of ornament, magical practice, and transgressive acts, once blended into one, open the way to a moment of rapture or ecstasy. Her research is concerned with the influence of magical and occult philosophy on visual culture. She creates tools such as rings and marionettes to pry open the question of how magic works as a metaphysical, creative, and philosophical practice. The lecture will offer insights on her approach to research, discussing how she gives material form to scholarly inquiry on occult philosophy and esoteric practices.

Within the lecture, Hunt will trace the animistic cultural history of the puppet, a universal form of storytelling and a kind of proto cinema, in which supernatural surrogates, rather than actors, carry the story. Beginning with the Hermetic concept of the homunculus and the origins of the automaton, she explores how puppets have functioned across art history and continue to shape contemporary art practice. To conclude, Hunt will delve into the magical counterpart of the puppet: the poppet. In folk magic and witchcraft, a poppet is a meticulously crafted figurine symbolising an individual, used to cast spells or provide magical assistance. Traditionally believed to possess the power to influence the mind of its creator and alter reality, the poppet emerges as a particularly potent tool, an autonomous entity seemingly 'released' from another realm to act on behalf of its creator.

Emily Hunt (b.1981) is an Australian-born and Berlin-based artist. Her work has been exhibited widely, including recent museum exhibitions The Grotto, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and MORE MAGIC! at Rijksmuseum Meermanno in The Hague. This November Hunt’s work will appear in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Maiden Mother Crone, alongside Del Kathryn Barton and Jess Johnson.