Detail from The Trials by Emma Talbot
(Picture: Carlo Vannini)The heroine of the narrative that propels Emma Talbot’s Whitechapel installation was partly inspired by Gustav Klimt. His painting The Three Ages of Woman features an image of an elderly woman that Talbot has described as “inert, incapable and ashamed”, next to a younger woman and infant.
Talbot upends the Austrian artist’s patriarchal gaze. Her older woman – who we see in huge painted-silk hangings crossing the gallery, in a brilliant animation and in beautiful drawings – is a matriarch of wisdom and knowledge, power and agency. Faced with the ruins of a society driven by extraction, destruction and oppression, she seeks sustainability, care and freedom – a new, post-anthropocentric vision to tackle the climate emergency.
