Words: Bridget Moran. Art and Captions: Emma Yardley 2021-11-16 08:45:12
Emma Yardley’s freehand landscapes ride along on truck tailgates, beat-up Yeti coolers and mud-caked mountain bikes. They decorate whole walls at pottery collectives and sweet-smelling bakeries. One’s even permanently inked into her skin. Whether doodled on her last shred of Moleskine paper or stretched across the side of a van, Yardley’s lines and dots are incarnations of movement. Originally hailing from Vermont, Yardley became nomadic in early adulthood. She cleaned hostels in New Zealand, sat at a Buddhist retreat in Nepal, and nursed a spinal injury in Patagonia—all in search of the alpine peaks she dreamed about as a kid. Eventually she made her way to the American West and her lines and dots followed. Her drawing process, though mostly subconscious, follows a similar path. “It usually starts with hills from where I’m from,” Yardley says. “The first lines are really scary, so I draw my comfort zone.” Each piece starts simply with ink or paint. There are no penciled outlines, no projectors, tape or stencils. For Yardley, every blank piece of paper and every white wall must start with a commitment to one big line and it all flows from there. “My body craves that one big drop,” Yardley says. “My hips and body want to first engage with the piece in that way.” She tends to draw water lines next, as they represent her current state of flow and flux. “Then I draw the peaks that Little Emma always dreamed about,” she continues. “To finish, I draw dots. They’re a personal conclusion to the piece—to hold it all together. The dots are the cherry on top.” She jokes that when she gifts her artwork to friends, they often count the number of dots in their pieces and compare them to each other. More dots means Yardley spent more time on the piece. “How much does Em love me? How many dots did I get?” As if each dot is a little valentine with which to measure their friendship. Yardley admits there’s some truth to that. The more dots she draws, the more time she gets to spend with that work, with the person who will receive the piece. When money was tight at Christmas, she made art for her dad. When she connects with friends on the road, she will often leave them with some lines and dots before they part ways. One place you won’t find her work is stamped onto stickers or mass printed onto merch. Manufacturing “stuff” for the sake of making money has never sat well with her. Her commission-based work allows her to design pieces with purpose, without creating waste. While Yardley admits she flirts with the temptation of bulk art and easier money from time to time, she is unwavering in her dedication to building meaningful connections to people and their stories, to her inner child that begs to draw on big blank walls. That inner child also sees lines that connect to each other in a form of hyperreality that, perhaps, only she can really understand. “There’s this moment when the lines breathe together,” she says. “It’s almost like they magnetize. Sometimes I doubt this one line will exactly follow the previous line, and then I see it happening and it feels like a magnet is holding them together. They harmonize, and it is the most stunning moment for me.” Curious, I pressed my nose to a paper that held thousands of Yardley’s tiny lines and dots. It looked like lace, so fine and intricate. Everything fit together just so. It was hypnotizing. Why does she choose lines and dots? Why, when she could use any technique in the world that might be an ounce less maddening than drawing tens of thousands of tiny lines and dots, did she choose to take the hard route? “Life is so chaotic that all I want is to have simplicity—to show how simple complex things can be,” Yardley says. “As the pieces grow together, they become complex, but then you zoom in and see that it’s just a line. It’s just a dot.”
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