Vela Projects is pleased to present Whale Fall, Emma Wootton’s debut solo exhibition.

The title draws on the deep-sea phenomenon in which a whale’s death gives rise to a complex ecosystem, sustaining life through decay. Wootton presents soft sculptures inhabiting a similar suspended moment of transformation. Gathered like scavengers, hybrid forms - part animal, part machine - suggest a future world, neither fully natural, nor fully human.

Emma Wootton is a multidisciplinary artist who predominantly works with sculptural installations and wearable sculpture. Wootton’s installations take the shape of whimsical alternative realities that soften and give form to faceless fears.Wootton’s current practice is concerned with anxiety and paranoia, particularly its intersection with climate change. Her work aims to express her feelings of powerlessness and loss, through the use of monstrous imagery and references to a dystopia. By creating sculptures that are the hybridised forms of animals, and machines, her imagined creatures symbolise a state of being both victims, and creators of destruction. Her work aims to invoke the fear of the unnatural, the out of place, and uncanny, yet also the beauty of both natural and manmade forms.