Emily Tracy

Emily Tracy has created socially engaged projects which invite collaboration over many years.

Using collage, objects and collaborative research, and, inspired by museum or archive ordering systems, she works to create participatory installation, small sculptural pieces, collage and artist books. These often reflect upon our relationship with our surroundings and our changing environment.
She has invited audiences to collect and sort clutter, help reunite lost property, create collage to reflect our roller coaster lives of the last two years, and ask the question ‘What do we hold dear?’ Recent projects have been driven to explore the human desire to know, to find and to collect, and how this relates to our lives and places we live in.

Emily has created projects for The Arts Council, SPACE, Metal (Peterborough), The Museum of London (Docklands), The British Museum, The Bloomsbury Festival and Up Projects. She has presented her work at LCN (SPACE), Nunnery Gallery, Akkigalleria, Finland, and Shunt Lounge.

For b-side festival 2023 - Constant Effort

For 60 years, or less than a lifetime, The Portland Bird Observatory and its dedicated voluntary birdwatchers, have closely observed the skies and their surroundings on The Bill. This collective action has amassed a huge and valuable set of data which is fed into national databases and used to understand what is happening to the UK Bird population and our environment. As humans we have a desire to interpret, to see patterns, to put things in boxes so that we can understand them, but often things are far more complicated.

‘Constant Effort’ attempts to start conversation, to explore and celebrate this data, and it’s means of collection, through the presentation of a visual snapshot of species sightings at ten year intervals from 1962 to 2022. We can’t always see the ‘wood for the trees’, but this installation made through collective creation, will attempt to visaulise some of the data on Portland species, incorporating birds, moths and flora and fauna, in order to spark conversation and understanding of the rich intertwined ecology that exists in ‘The Last Landscape’.