6th edition, 2015–2017, Emma Hart

Clay is closest to fiction writing. You can put how you feel about something onto the outside of its appearance.
Emma Hart

For the sixth edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, winning artist Emma Hart (b. 1974) created a large-scale installation that grew out of research into the traditional designs and methods of Italian maiolica. These large-scale, hand-painted ceramic works are based on her exploration of both visual patterns and patterns of psychological behavior.

Mamma Mia!, Hart’s winning project for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, explores visual and behavioural patterns, reflecting on how they can be represented and subverted.

Hart makes artworks that capture the confusion, stress and nausea of everyday experience. Always in pursuit of genuine life and genuine feelings, Hart uses ceramics to create claustrophobic installations that physically and emotionally engage viewers, or smaller works that seem to stretch out toward them.

There are frequent verbal and visual spillages, and her use of clay is often corporeal, forming approximate body parts that act as surrogates for human action and effort.

During the Italian residency organized by Collezione Maramotti, Hart travelled between Milan, Rome, Todi and Faenza.
In Milan, she attended the Scuola Mara Selvini Palazzoli to learn more about the Milan Systems Approach, a constructivist method of family therapy that involves physical reenactments and the study of behavioural patterns.
In Rome, Hart visited a series of funerary monuments with Katherine Huemoeller, a scholar from Princeton University specialized in the family relations and structures of ancient Rome.
The second stage of the residency allowed Hart to develop on her experiments with clay, learning ancient decorative techniques to apply to contemporary ceramics.
In Todi, Umbria, with the support of Bibo's Place – a cultural association headed by Matteo Boetti and Andrea Bizzarro – Hart discovered maiolica, a traditional Italian glazing technique that inspired the motifs incorporated in these works.

Mamma Mia!

Whitechapel Gallery

(12 July – 3 September 2017)

Collezione Maramotti

(15 October 2017 – 18 February 2018)

The Italian residency organized for Hart by Collezione Maramotti yielded the installation Mamma Mia!, a family of large ceramic heads that seem to be in dialogue with each other. In Hart’s work, clay takes on forms that are half human, half artificial: hanging sculptures that emit light.

Each of the eleven sculptures is jug-like in shape, with the spout as a nose and the opening as a mouth. Made by the artist in Faenza in close collaboration with Aida Bertozzi, the long-time assistant of artist Carlo Zauli, the sculptures were glazed with a range of motifs such as cartoon speech bubbles. The vivid decorations inside of the heads, conceived and hand-painted by the artist, are the result of research into the traditional designs and practice of Italian maiolica. The space between viewer and object is key, as always in Hart’s work. It is charged with the artist’s personal take on her experiences in Italy: heat, light and colour, as well as language and family dynamics, which seem to be recreated by the works.

The exhibition Mamma Mia! was also presented at Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh at the end of 2018. After the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Hart went on to win the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2022.