Endings are Beginnings - Curation of 4 Tiles

About this work

Endings are Beginnings began as an attempt to prove something to myself: that I could commit to a project and see it through. Sixteen individual reduction woodcut prints, each hand-carved, six-layered, and pulled in an edition of eight, assembling into a single mosaic roughly a metre square. The images come from photographs taken during the second UK lockdown in 2021, when I regularly became Mara — a cabaret alter ego I used to physically work through the angst of living alone in isolation. As Mara, I could acknowledge intense emotional waves and respond to intuitive pulls to change how I was living, without the pressure of actually having to act on them. There was a release in becoming her, but once the costume came off, whatever I'd worked through could be dismissed as play — something separate from the rest of my life. Two years later, in 2023, I returned to those images and began carving. Each of the sixteen blocks was traced from a photograph, drawn in Indian ink, and cut by hand. Printing took around 150 hours across a month, mostly over the festive break — the most sustained time I've ever given to a self-directed project. Six layers of ink build each tile: silver, a graduated blue, light peach, orange and pink, red, and finally a dark blue that pulls the whole image into focus. What emerged, alongside the technical process, was a way of thinking about the space between feeling something and acting on it. Endings are Beginnings considers the complex balance of emotion that feeds into decision-making — the pull between following an instinct and the risk of leaving behind what's comfortable. It sits at the precipice of a commitment, in that moment just before a choice is made. If endings really are beginnings, then maybe the answer is always to leave. Assembled, the sixteen tiles read as one image. Taken in smaller groupings — two, or four — they say something different again, more direct, less composed. I think of the mosaic less as a finished statement and more as a starting point: a way of testing whether I could return to a difficult period at a distance, print by print, and find something usable in it.

About the artist

Emily Grenville-Grey (b. 1991) is a painter and printmaker based in South East London.

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