Oyster shells and bones become pearl keepsakes in Emma Witter's jewelled items

On a rainy day in June, in mid-lock down 2020, the artist Emma Witter was wrestling with romantic heartbreak and wondering how she was going to pay the rent on her Hoxton apartment as the pandemic took hold. A number flashed up on her phone from Gallery Fumi, the Mayfair space founded by Sam Pratt and Valerio Capo, who then visited her and bought a Bone Nest – a wall hanging of intricately arranged chicken feet bones. 'That call was a bright light on a really grey day,' recalls Witter.

Making art from tiny bones wasn’t something that she considered possible as a career growing up in the commuter belt of Hertfordshire as the working-class child of a father who worked in IT and a mother who was a teaching assistant. Alignment to a trade loomed, but she resisted and found her way to Central Saint Martins to study Performance Design where the magic of scenography blew her mind. Design also felt safer than art but somehow obsession for the objects and materials themselves took hold and the multi-disciplinary artist she is today was born.

'Emma’s work touches on so many important ideas, our history, how we have become conditioned to think about how we place value. Our views on fragility and beauty,' says Trino Verkade, the CEO of Sarabande, an accelerator foundation for artists established by the late great fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen. While at Sarabande, Witter became homeless, and Verkade secured her a 6-month live-work residency with Selfridges which literally saved her. The web of collaborators, mentors and collectors is more vital now than ever for artists with the volatility of world markets scaring clients and an art market in the doldrums.

Then on July 3rd, her first solo exhibition for Fumi opened called ‘The Moon’s Daughter is a Pearl,’ inspired by the poetry of Anna Souter and the intertwining of art and ecology. Discarded oyster shells bathed in copper sulphate, distilled water and charged with electricity became textured metallic pearl keepsakes. Some clustered around mirrors, some acted as goblets and others as bowls in either black or reddish gold with a shimmering pearlescent inner world. The results are as mesmerising as if Witter with her wild red hair had collected scallop shells from the fictional world of Botticelli’s Venus.

To make something this beautiful out of waste has become her signature, transforming both her and the object. Her dream now is to start a large-scale production line where food waste like bone and shell could be deconstructed into artistic resources such as charcoal, inks and oils to create art, akin to Warhol’s legendary factory – but with food. This type of boundary-pushing is exactly why FUMI are showing her work according to Sam Pratt. “The art world’s pace pushes artists into a kind of hyper-productivity, often at the expense of depth, reflection, and a genuine engagement with craft and materiality. Emma’s work is the antithesis of that.”

The Moon’s Daughter is a Pearl by Emma Witter is at Gallery Fumi