Interview with Esme Bone, a final year student on the European Fine Art Masters programme at The Margate School, who talks about their practice and their pieces prepared for the exhibition 'Enchanted Things' showing the artwork of the final year students.
Drawing is central to Esme’s practice, as a tool for investigation, extraction, and expression. She uses spontaneity, improvisation, and impulse to allow things to emerge with fluidity, giving in to chance and the messiness of gesture and material.
Waste accumulates on the floor, and things change and transform, collapsing and re-emerging in different configurations. She enjoys the absurdity in the repetition of endless tasks. With her hands, she brings things together with a loose and temporary knot. Placing, arranging, balancing and resting, each piece holding potential energy, ready to fall, grow, tumble and crumble. The work does not wrestle with time, but gathers dust, dirt and cracks; it joins in with the ongoingness.
Playing with gravity and mass Esme explores the tipping point and the moment just before. She pushes the work to balance in a contradictory place between fragile and robust, weighty and weightless. The work lives with baggyness, plenty of wriggle room to expand, contract, veer and swerve. It is important to her that the materials have agency, directness and truth. She explores their possibilities, proximities and chemical reactions, their relationships with oxygen, water, gravity and time, how they cling to one another or reject each other.
Filmed and edited by Nicola Roper linktr.ee/nicrop