Emily FloydFar Rainbow

Taking its title from a Soviet science-fiction story set on the imaginary planet Rainbow, this survey is drawn from the past ten years of Emily Floyd’s fifteen-year practice while also including new works devised specifically for Heide’s galleries and grounds. Utopian thinking of various types—also at the heart of much science fiction—has been a continual source of inspiration for Floyd, and her work draws from the legacies of radical modernism, exploring ideas about community, activism and alternative education.

In this exhibition her new installation Far Rainbow, for example, has been informed by the New Lanark schoolroom established by visionary industrialist Robert Owen (1771-1858), and she increasingly refers to digital collective models, as typified by the free and open-source operating system Linux.

Floyd is widely known for her large-scale sculptures and public commissions referencing childrens’ educational toys—like those made in the tradition of architect and educationalist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) or by her own toy-maker father and grandmother. A new permanent outdoor sculpture Abstract Labour commissioned by Heide will be unveiled at the time of the exhibition. The sculpture has been funded by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria and the Victorian Public Sculpture Fund.

IN THE NEWS

Art for the people
Steve Dow, The Weekly Review

“It’s an enormous, varied, tactile and of course colourful (!) show”
Lucy Feagins, The Design Files

Emily Floyd fills enormous space at Heide with initmate shapes
Robert Nelson, The Age

“Far Rainbow, curated by Sue Cramer, teems with exquisitely constructed and thematically layered works”
Sophie Knezic, Frieze Magazine