Light ‘Em Up

How an exploding paper maché installation and hidden gnome at Grayson Perry’s studio turned out to be pivotal moments in the career of sculptor Emmely Elgersma.

When I speak to sculptor Emmely Elgersma, she’s putting the finishing touches to the 50 lamps she’s created for the recently launched Atelier100 project, and she’s cold. With the rise in energy costs, her studio has become expensive to heat, and when you work with paper maché aka cold water and paper, things can get tricky when the temperature drops. But, Emmely isn’t afraid of hard work or difficult conditions. If anything, her life and career so far have been punctuated with testing circumstances that she’s had to overcome to get to where she is. 

Today, we’re so often presented with the edited success stories of creative people – their trajectories smoothly ironed out to only include the shiny highlights, but no one, I repeat, no one, got anywhere without some significant bumps in the road. In person, Emmely is very funny, approachable and unique, much like her work. Speaking to her about the challenges she’s experienced is a refreshing reminder that sometimes out of a crisis, an even better opportunity arises. 

Originally from Holland, Emmely moved to the UK with her parents when she was six and settled in the picturesque village of Bilsthorpe, near Nottingham. Creative from a young age, Emmely would create small toys or miniature works of art from the things she found lying around the house. Her mother, an accountant by day, gave her some early inspiration, “My mum was always making things; she was creative. She used to make our birthday cakes with really amazing decorations. She made a Snow White one once, and I helped her decorate all of the faces from the figures. I think it’s more interesting to make things out of what you already have.” 

You can trace this early influence of creating something new out of existing materials throughout Emmely’s career, from her earlier work right up to the collection of beautiful lamps she’s made for the Atelier100 project. However, Emmely’s journey hasn’t been as straightforward as that tidy throughline might suggest.

Having outgrown village life, Emmely moved to Manchester at 17, where she spent time doing what teenagers do best – partying with friends – before moving to London at 19 to study Textile Design at Central St Martins (CSM). To supplement her student loans, Emmely worked in the bars of Shoreditch, an experience she said created a stronger network of creative people than her time at CSM, “I was working in bars with people who were from all different disciplines who had to work to pay for their uni courses. I worked with stylists and artists – who I still work with today.” This network turned out to be the community Emmely was hoping to find and one that would remain tight long beyond closing time. 

Feeling lost and experiencing a classic post-BA lack of direction, Emmely worked at a ceramics shop to sustain herself during the day and, in the evening, designed her own curriculum that encapsulated a range of adult university courses, including opera, anthropology, portraiture and sculpture. Giving herself the time to delve into this rich array of subjects turned out to be the escape she needed; it gave her the time to process what she was actually interested in rather than feeling the pressure to stick to the subject she decided to study in her late teens – a bizarre quirk of our education system that Emmely finds it baffling, “You have to choose these subjects to study at the age of 17 or 18 that can have a massive impact on the rest of your life, how mad is that? I don’t support the decisions that village girl was making. I was all over the place back then.” 

Fortunately, the evening class in sculpture fuelled Emmely’s imagination and inspired her to enrol in an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea, which turned out to be the nurturing and creative experience she’d hoped for. “The tutors at Chelsea were really amazing and patient with me. They were like, ‘explore your interest in sculpture, don't put too much pressure on yourself.’ That was really helpful, and it made art school feel a lot more approachable as it had been something I’d been scared of before.”

Emmely’s fellow students also helped develop her practice into what it would become, “I was only there part-time, and the ceramics studio was always in use, so Karen, who’s now a shepherd outside of Brighton, suggested paper maché to me as an alternative and her advice started the whole obsession with the process.” Emmely then set about refining her practice, creating large-scale paper maché pots that made up her end-of-year show – an experience that couldn’t have gone any worse…

“For the final exhibition, I’d made these massive paper maché pots that I was going to suspend from the arches in the courtyard at Chelsea. We’d finished the installation, but because it was so freakishly hot, the inflatables inside one of the pieces exploded and fell from where we’d hung it – in front of everyone. It was the bank holiday in August, and the show opened the following week. I remember thinking, ‘I've just got rubble left after working on this for three months.’ So, that weekend I went back into the studio and remade and repaired the work to rehang for the show.”

To add insult to injury, at the final show's opening ceremony, Emmely found out she hadn’t been chosen for the studio award she’d been shortlisted for, a prize that would have set her up for the following year. “I was sitting outside the show crying, just so exhausted from everything that had happened, and my mum came and was like, ‘stop crying, you big baby, you can’t have everything all the time.’ She was so right. It was really important to develop that sense of resilience because not everything in life goes your way and if I hadn’t learned that, it would have been a lot harder in the future to accept the way things sometimes work out – or don’t!”

This experience of rejection, or failure or whatever you want to call it, can be a miserable thing to go through, but it’s one of the facts of life that we all seem to forget about – not everything will go our way and finding your way through is almost a game of numbers. It’s about getting back up and starting again – something Emmely has done repeatedly.

A turning point came in the form of national treasure Grayson Perry, who tweeted a picture of a ceramic gnome that Emmely hid in his studio whilst there on a university visit. When it was announced he would be curating the 2021 Royal Academy summer show, Emmely set to work creating a life-size gnome to submit which went on to be included in the final show. This validation and confidence boost encouraged her to continue on her path: "Being accepted into the RA Summer Show after so many rejections felt like it was the start of something new.”

This small gnome intervention is a microdose of Emmely’s personality, perfectly encapsulating her sense of mischief and her drive to create opportunities for herself. These attributes can be found throughout Emmely’s work, from the supersized Raheem Sterling football jersey, that she made in response to the racism he’d experienced following the Euros that went on to make it into the Guinness Book of Records, to a giant Marmite jar created for the Let Them Eat Fake exhibition at the Bomb Art Factory, Emmely’s creations invite you in, and they make you smile. They bring joy and tactility into a sometimes dull and flat life, and there’s often a fascinating story behind each creation.

The collection of 50 lamps she’s created for the Atelier100 project is no different. Each hand-made paper maché lampshade rests on a unique base made from tennis ball tubes that Emmely collected from various tennis clubs across London, “I contacted around 100 tennis clubs across London asking if I could use their old tennis ball tubes, and a few got back to me, so each lamp comes with a sticker to tell you which tennis club supplied the base for your lamp. I've made extra that I'm going to take to the tennis club to say thank you.”

Emmely’s drive to go deeper, to look outside of herself and the usual cultural references, is what makes her work so interesting. It is a rich approach influenced by Emmely’s life outside her creative endeavours. In 2019, with minimal experience or interest in football, Emmely put herself in a football coaching programme, “I like how your brain changes and thinks differently when you do new things. I found I was missing the feeling I had while doing all of the adult university courses, so I thought, ‘I'm really good at fantasy football. Maybe I'll become a football coach.’” This naïvety turned out to be the inspired push in the right direction and has led Emmely into a rewarding role within an inspiring community that differs wildly from her life within art and design, “I’ve got my badge now, and I teach disabled adults football part-time. It’s such a fun and physical thing to do. I love it.” 

This openness to embracing life outside of one set discipline or way of living has always served Emmely well, and for her, it’s the beauty of the Atelier100 project. “I’ve loved being surrounded by such different people. I feel like the art world can be very secretive and competitive, people don’t share who stretched their canvases or helps with their projects, but this has felt like a supportive crew of people who are all happy to share skills and contacts.” 

Creativity is sometimes cast as this elusive vapour in the ether we’re all chasing. There are endless books on where to find it and how to cultivate or harness it, but sometimes it’s just about hard work and paying attention to life around you. It’s about showing up again and again, even when things aren’t going your way and your studio is freezing. It’s about working with what you’ve got and finding interesting people to collaborate with. It’s not a final destination; it’s an ever-evolving journey, and if you want to enjoy it, take a leaf out of Emmely’s book and find a very good sense of humour that will carry you through. 

Photography by Tami Aftab

Words by Danielle Pender

Read the other stories in our Atelier100 series.