Emma Roche with Small Night

With an idiosyncratic approach to painting encompassing weaving, knotting and knitting, Roche's unorthodox textural paintings are accompanied by a new large-scale commission of hand-screen printed works on paper by Small Night. Small Night is an art and text project by James Merrigan.

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Being ‘lined-out’, according to the Urban Dictionary, refers to the kind of anxiety felt by an assembly line worker. The stress caused by simple tasks and the monotony of “the line” evokes dynamic states of anxiety and comfort, exacerbated by repetitiveness.

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Roche’s preparatory drawings. made quickly and obsessively, are informed by the humdrum of repetitive daily tasks. In contrast, the processes employed by Roche in the knitted paintings are slow and arduous, where long lines of paint are prepared and dried to be used like wool or thread. The ‘should-be’ liquid material is forced to behave in an apparently impossible but measured way.