Emma Talbot: Everything is Energy — Silk, Storytelling and the Charge of Being Alive
Stepping into Arnolfini’s autumn exhibition Everything is Energy (on now until 8 February 2026) feels like entering the inside of a thought — one that shimmers, spirals and refuses to settle. British artist Emma Talbot transforms the galleries into an immersive silk world where drawing, painting, sculpture and animation drift together like invisible currents. Her practice has always hovered between the intimate and the epic, but here an electric urgency amplifies every surface and gesture.
Are You a Living Thing That Is Dying or a Dying Thing That Is Living?, 2024 by Emma Talbot Courtesy and copyright Emma Talbot Studio.
Two monumental silk installations, co-commissioned with Copenhagen Contemporary, anchor the exhibition. Everything is Energy and Are You a Living Thing That Is Dying or a Dying Thing That Is Living? hang like illuminated scrolls, inviting visitors to wander among them as though inside a living tapestry or a story unfolding in mid-air. Their jewel-toned surfaces are threaded with Talbot’s handwritten questions — “What is life?”; “Are you the dreamer or the illusion?” — encouraging viewers to linger, loop back and create their own drifting, non-linear paths through the work.
Are You a Living Thing That Is Dying or a Dying Thing That Is Living? (Detail), 2024 by Emma Talbot Courtesy and copyright Emma Talbot Studio.
Drawing on folklore, myth and speculative futures, Talbot moves us across centuries with the ease of someone gathering strands for a single woven piece. Beneath the playfulness runs a clear urgency: a planet in crisis, a world increasingly mediated by artificial intelligence, and the unsettling possibility of human life becoming sealed away from nature. In Everything is Energy, she imagines people living in sterile pods, surrounded by screens and surveillance — a vision uncomfortably close to our present landscape.
Everything is Energy, 2024 by Emma Talbot Courtesy and copyright Emma Talbot Studio.
Yet despair isn’t her final sweep of the brush. The companion work offers a duality of endings and beginnings, holding decay and renewal in the same breath, suggesting that even in collapse, the potential for growth endures. This balance mirrors Talbot’s evolving approach to sustainability since winning the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2020, when environmental responsibility became woven directly into her materials and methods.
Everything is Energy, 2024 by Emma Talbot Courtesy and copyright Emma Talbot Studio.
Amid the grandeur of the silk environments, Talbot’s quieter drawings offer stillness. These works trace a lineage back to 2006, when personal loss drew her back to her sketchbook in search of a language beyond words. The recurring female figure — part guide, part internal self-portrait — appears again here, moving through landscapes and, in her new animation You Are Not the Centre (Inside the Animal Mind), into the bodies of animals, prompting a rethinking of our place within the natural world.
Ultimately, Everything is Energy invites us to pause, question and reconnect. In a moment defined by haste and digital mediation, Talbot offers something quietly radical: space to look closely, and space to listen.
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Further Information:
Emma Talbot: Everything is Energy is on now at the Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, until 8 February 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Are You a Living Thing That Is Dying or a Dying Thing That Is Living? (Detail), 2024 by Emma Talbot Courtesy and copyright Emma Talbot Studio.
All further images as credited in photo captions.