Emiline Trenton
Emiline explores intimacy within self, healing through the bodily and the performative. She is an international practitioner, interrogating architectural textiles for pain and rehabilitation, working artistically and methodically as an artist, designer, and researcher.
Fascinated by the dialogue between structures and the body. It is haptic, the subversive, honing the deeply personal, reflecting upon ancestral trauma and oppression of bodies. Merging the poetic and the scientific, she employs knit to catalyze a lost layer of protection, shielding and unveiling.
Emiline is a graduate of the Master of Arts, Textiles Programme at Royal College of Art and the Bachelor of Industrial Design, Industrial and Interaction Design Program at Syracuse University, New York.
What is the depth of healing? The internal? It was like one less hug. I explore the intimacy within self, healing through the bodily and the performative.
It was the loss of a dear sweater, a melancholy of losing my aunt, that began this journey. In seeking to understand self and in search of this loss of a layer of protection, I marry the philosophical and the poetic as a catalyst for thought in what it means to shield and unveil. It is the ritual and the habitual, drawing from the notion of dress. Peeling off layers like an onion, shedding a second skin.
Pain Bodies reflect upon ancestral trauma, the oppression of bodies and the evaporated body (Messager, 20). Knit sculptures that are spiritual and ethereal, which interrogate what it means to earthen, to ground oneself.
Ana Mendieta once said, “I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.” It is the impact of sharing the deeply emotional that we do not forget. To untether emotion is to rid one of identity, as Juliet Koss speaks of in the Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls.
A reimagined ritual of healing and revealing, to reflect into the emotion—It is the body that is informing choices and decisions, the embodied experience. A feeling intuitive and instinctive, where placing words become difficult.
Emiline applies radical empathy, criticality engaging knit as a tool. Weaving holistic and innovative practices in draping on the industrial knitting machine. Intrigued by the possibilities of hollowing cavities and kinetic movement, playing with tension and pressure. It is the mental, the emotional and the physical armor, an intervention to subvert form and structure.
Pain Bodies are a healing tool, evoking a restorative dialogue, a meditative experience.
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