Emryn Ingram-Shute
Mistaken Identity
stainless steel servig tray, tuna can, matt varnish and acrylic hair
11 x 40 x 20 cm
$600.00 ea
An estimate of over half a million modern day sea-born slaves are indentured world-wide in a wasteful fishing industry. “Mistaken Identity” is a subconscious response to the plight of these slaves and that of non-targeted fish species caught in trawling nets. Both human slaves and fish byproducts suffer misery and death from their non-identity. Just as when mermaids were miscast as sirens that lured sailors to their death, “Mistaken Identity” explores the absurd tension between, on one hand, what is socially visible as good, and on the other, the wasted human lives and multitude of discarded fish varieties, haplessly caught in industrial nets.
Emryn Ingram-Shute is an emerging multi-disciplinary Australian artist. She completed her Bachelor and Masters of Fine Art at National Art School, NSW in 2022 majoring in sculpture where she was the recipient of the Sculpture by the Sea award, John Olsen prize for drawing and equal first in the Brandon Trackman Award. She is represented by the Dominik Mersch Gallery and her works are held in private collections around Australia.
Ingram-Shute’s practice concerns the affective in-between space across artist, object and viewer. She is interested in the found object as a generative medium that sets forth a series of events starting with her encounter with it in its discarded form. She is particularly interested in how power structures are embedded within objects and how our relationship to materiality is not passive, by its very nature we are entangled with it. Through the distillation of objects or their reconfigurations, constructions and deconstructions she hopes to open the possibility for the viewer’s interaction to break down binaries and dualisms, beyond language.