Emma Rani Hodges

About the work

‘I’m more, I’m not forgotten parts’ is an installation that explores memory, mythology and ghosts. In this installation Hodges cannibalizes their old artworks to create something new. This is a process of remembering, ripping, cutting and eventually repairing alongside making new parts. Hodges works with the philosophy that memory can be stored in objects, recalling their cultural connection to animism. The pieces of fabric that make up this installation all lived lives before arriving here. Some of the fabric belonged to Hodges’s grandmother, who was a seamstress in Nonthaburi. These scraps of fabric came from a place where ancestor worship and care for ghosts is embedded in everyday practice. Within this installation there are spirit houses and characters from Thai folklore. For Hodges, this installation is a place for souls to rest and for their childhood memories and fear of ghosts to take a physical form.

About the artist

Emma Rani Hodges is an emerging artist who lives and works on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. They are ฉันเป็นลูกของ ไทย ออสเตรเลียน  ‘Chan pen luk khrueng Thai Australia’. which in English translates to ‘I am the child of Thailand and Australia’. Hodges’s practice explores intergenerational trauma, community building, migration and multiethnic identity. They do this through mixed media textile installations and acts of storytelling. Fluctuating between image, text and object Hodges’s work resists easy categorisation. They use ambiguous materiality to examine social boundaries, and to explore feelings of ‘otherness’. Hodges’s work utilises their feelings of otherness to create new self-knowledge, while acknowledging that the existence of the ‘other’ depends on specific political conditions that influence relationships between marginalised bodies and society.