Emily Speed
Lecturer
Fine Art
Emily is a lecturer in Fine Art and has been working permanently at MMU since 2022. Also a practising artist, Speed has a studio at The Bluecoat in Liverpool.
Known for her work examining the relationship between the body and architecture, Speed’s practice considers how a person is shaped by the buildings they have occupied and how a person occupies their own psychological space. Working in sculpture, performance and film, Speed's work looks at the relationship between people and buildings and in particular the power dynamics at play in built space. Her work plays with scale and creates layers around the body, often hybrid forms of clothing and architecture.
Over the last few years, Speed has had solo presentations at Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives, TRUCK, Calgary, and Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Texas. She has been commissioned to make performances for Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Laumeier Sculpture Park (St Louis) and Edinburgh Art Festival among others and recent exhibitions include: Drawing Room, London; A Woman’s Place at Knole House; Body Builders at Exeter Phoenix Gallery; and The Happenstance, Scotland + Venice at the Architecture Biennale in 2018.
Projects
Artist in Residence - Energy House 2.0 Salford
July 2023 - Dec 2024. With the University of Salford Art Collection in partnership with Castlefield Gallery, this is an 18 month residency to develop new work in response to the groundbreaking research being carried out at Energy House 2,0, around topics of energy efficiency, the climate crisis, net zero research, and the future of housing and homes. Details…
Drawing Room, London - Unbuild, 2023
As Drawing Room opened in its first, permanent home after twenty years of nomadic activity, UNBUILD: a site of possibility was an opportunity to consider the impact of buildings on our bodies, our minds, our memories and our dreams. The selected artists used expanded forms of drawing to explore how the built environment represents our dreams and aspirations, cultural and physical displacement and the inequities of our patriarchal society. Details…
John Florent Stone Fellow 2023 - University of Edinburgh
A nine-month fellowship based at Edinburgh College of Art, culminating in an exhibition in ECA's Sculpture Court in September 2023. The fellowship was an opportunity to explore archive material documenting the annual Revel at ECA, looking at how students have created their own spaces and identities within the institution. Details…