Banana For Scale : New Works by Emily Fong

Thank you to all who came and enjoyed my works at DOK Artist Space, Edinburgh, in October. I had many awesome conversations with you all about bananas, hearts, brexit etc, etc. I hope that you took something special away with you as well. 

These two works were the inner core (installation) of my show and what I had hoped to achieve was something like a floating home. An island that was safe to explore some big stuff like grief and the transport (migration) of precious organs and bodies. I've been experimenting with casting bananas and banana plants over the past year and what I've been delighted to discover is that the banana heart is aesthetically close to that of a human heart. This discovery has opened up so many imaginative possibilities. With the piece titled Transplant seen below in the foreground, i have re-assembled two severed parts of the banana plant to an off-cut of garden hose and hung it from the ceiling with chain and a meat hook. With this material choice, I am hoping to make an association between the private inner mechanics of bodies and the outer workings of domestic environments. 

My wife and I have moved a lot in the past 3 years. 5 times to be exact, including a big inter-continental move. This doesn't come without it's share of emotional trauma and upheval...and we're not even fleeing from conflict and war. Alice is an expert in packing and stacking and she devised a system whereby we re-use supermarket fruit boxes to pack and move our belongings. For 3 months over last winter, the majority of our posessions were stacked neatly in these collected boxes and housed in a shipping container in Fife, Scotland. In my world, everything is artful. Every choice in life is filled with some random sense of poetry or meaning. The thought of all our worldly posessions living in fruitboxes seemed at once absurd, painful, privliged and perfect.

Two fruit boxes we collected had the saying Eat Me Keep Me Bananas written all over them. I found them whilst casting the banana plant in the middle of winter. Saving them out of random association and intuition, I knew they'd come in handy when the time was right. The Transplant is housed in this retrofit fruit box, which has been surgically reduced in size and reinforced with a negative-space inlay made of papier mâché which was formed around the suspended plant. This makes the container an essential part of the piece as well as an effective and safe method of transporting a delicate sculpture.. internationally if need be. What's important about the action of retrofitting a fruit box to house the movement of organ-like sculptures is the meditation on how easy it is to transport goods internationally for consumption and profit. Humans however are not easily consumed, therefore the movement of people is less staightforward. I guess from a place of deep empathy I am trying to create homes for the safe transport of awkwardly shaped hearts and colourful skins.

Prior to this exhibition Banana For Scale, in the process of studio mayhem and high productivity, I set some time aside to clear my thoughts and consolidate the onslaught of ideas. The task of laying down a simple manifesto to drive me forward was extremely useful.

Studio Manifesto of the NOW. Existing (playing) between the multiple crosshairs of three institutions:

Supermarket + Botanic Gardens + Surgeons Museum

There's really a lot more going on than that, but for the moment... that's keeping me a-float. 

Foreground: transplant, resin cast banana plant on garden hose and retrofit banana box with papier mâché inlay, dimensions variable.

Background: how to cope with the death of your unicorn (Edition 1 of 7), screen printed artist book inside bound bespoke skin with resin cast banana handle, dimensions variable.