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Emily Llamazales is an Atlanta-based mixed-media visual artist. She graduated from the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art in 2019 with a BA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art and Design. Llamazales primarily works within the mediums of photography and ceramics and at times her artistic practice integrates writing, screen printing, and found objects in order to weave together narratives of imaginative world building influenced by science fiction, hauntological philosophy and speculative thinking towards future ecology.
 

Llamazales received a 2022 Idea Capital Grant for the expansion of her ongoing body of work, Mörk Materia. She also served as the Program and Development Coordinator at Burnaway, a non-profit magazine of contemporary art criticism from the South. She is a recipient of the 2022/2023 Emerging Artist Award from the Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs and has been named as a finalist for the 2023 Emerging Artist Fellowship by Atlanta Celebrates Photography.

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About the art:

 

Llamazales’s ceramic and photographic sculptures build out narratives of imaginative utopia and address broad concerns over climate catastrophe and ecological crisis. Influenced by science fiction, hauntological philosophy and Jean Baudrillard’s idea of simulacrum, her most recent work takes direct inspiration from the sci-fi narrative of Swedish poet and critic Aase Berg’s epic poem "Mörk Materia". This body of work visualizes Berg’s post-human world of horrific strangeness and malignant renewal as described through the detailed prose of its narrator who witnesses a new order of biology: post radiation and climate disaster. Each ceramic resembles unique mutated flora, amoebas, ashen wings or a fleshy mechanical-organic hybrid.They feature ashen surfaces, mold-like glazes, and embellishments of adhered shells, rocks, and twisted metal as if they too are altered by catastrophe, unearthed from a future where biology has reorganized or broken down. Llamazales has devised photographic sculptural holograms in order to capture the essence of a corrupted feedback loop of images transmitted from a stricken Earth. These photographic holograms act as portals and consist of backlight transparent and translucent photographic prints in free standing steel frames. These large-scale, black and white photographs are sourced from her ongoing documentation of Arabia Mountain, a large granite outcrop east of Atlanta.