Emily Ryalls is a Wakefield-based artist working with photography, performance and sculpture to create spaces for engagement and connection. Central to Ryalls’ practice is an exploration of women’s embodied knowledge. She is fascinated with understanding the ways we come to know, and who is afforded the space to share such knowledge.
Within her work, the camera becomes a point of connection, and the photograph acts as a record of the exchange between women. With an interest in disrupting the usual power dynamic within a photographer/subject relationship, Ryalls will spend time on residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), inviting women to the park to engage in body mapping practices that utilise the natural world in collaboration with analogue photographic techniques.
With an interest in performance and Land art, as well as archives and knowledge systems, Ryalls is inspired by YSP as a limitless playground for women to explore these ideas.
The residency at YSP offers time and development for the artist’s upcoming performance, returning to the Park in Summer 2025. This exciting mass participation performance will see women from all ages and backgrounds taking to the hills, in the collective act of locating a feminist bodily archive. Documentation and traces of this work will form part of a larger body, to be realised and handprinted in The Art House’s Darkroom for the artist’s first solo exhibition later this year.
Since 2023, Ryalls has been developing this body of feminist research during her time on the University of York’s Centre for Women’s Studies, MA programme. Her research brings together diverse groups of women, inviting them to reimagine their body as an archive, storing memories like a sponge. This memory work asks, how can we best care, share, and preserve this bodily knowledge and what can be learnt from the process?
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