Emily Jay is an artist-scholar who is interested in engaging with Italy’s past in creative ways so as to re-center female perspectives into historical narratives. She currently researches the relationship between female saints and the cities they protect in Sicily utilizing arts-based research methodologies and new materialist philosophies. Jay is an Assistant Professor of Art at Ohio Northern University. She earned her BFA from Ohio Northern University, her MFA from Bowling Green State University, and her Ph.D. through Texas Tech University.
My practice begins as a contemporary animism. A belief that the things we do not usually think of as living might nevertheless possess lives of their own; that a city, a past, a saint, may linger, exert pressure, make demands, and have desires which shape the worlds around them. My work asks what happens when we approach them not simply as subjects to be studied, but as collaborators, as co-creators.
For some time now I have been working with Italian cities and their female patron saints, tracing the strange and intimate relationships that develop between a woman, her story, and the place that attempts to claim her. I am interested in how these female saints continue to inhabit and negotiate their cities: through streets and architecture, festivals and rituals, images, stories, devotions, memories, and everyday emergence. These relationships offer a way of unsettling dominant historical narratives, moving beyond the veil of how a place caters to the tourist, thereby allowing me to recenter the everyday lived experience of female figures and highlight methods of strength, survival and community.
I utilize an arts-based research approach, embedding, walking, mapping, looking, listening, collecting, and making to explore the city as palimpsest. Rather than arriving at a place with a predetermined form in mind, I try to create with it, allowing the particular conditions of a city, history, or saint to determine what the work needs to become. A project might emerge as a photograph, a poem, a painting, a sound work, a book, a map, or a site-specific installation—or move between several of these forms.
Across these different approaches, I am interested in encounter: how a place reveals itself slowly through movement and attention; how the past continues to act upon the present; and how making something can become a way of entering into conversation with lives that are difficult to locate, define, or even recognize as living.
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