Steven Rendall: Can you tell us something about your influences? Are there any artists, writers, musicians etc. in particular that are important to you and in what ways they have influenced your practice?

Emma White: Gillian Wearing, Bruce Nauman, conceptual art in general. Thomas Demand. I love Harun Farocki's films and the Coen brothers. It's a bit of a cliché these days but I'm very influenced in how I think about ideas by JL Borges, and I'm also a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut's pragmatic, literary humanism (I love the casually weighty way he uses language). Right now I'm also into Giorgio Morandi as well, because I'm making still lives. I can't figure out why I find his paintings so beautiful, so I keep coming back to them for that fresh shock of 'ooohhhhhh...'. The thing is, though, anything you spend any time looking at or thinking about becomes an influence. Of course I'm influenced a lot by my own life, the artifacts and narratives of just living and surviving. Material culture in general astounds me. I'm influenced a lot by friends as well, and family. The particular paradigm of how my family works is something that's strong for me in my work, although it's not like I'm making work about them. There are certain ways that 'we' in my family do things that are somewhat particular to us, and I've drawn a lot on that, like this sort of conflict between always being 'do'-y and having projects, and procrastinating and stuff. I'm the most chaotic member of a fairly ordered family and I think some of my work is about my trying to keep up with them, you know, 'getting it together', getting things in order.

SR: What were the particular approaches and/or processes that you used to make the work you are exhibiting at West Space. For example were there ways that you extended your practice in realising this work?

EM: I work in a very modular, fragmented kind of way, so not only does each work extend the practice, but I generally find myself directly or indirectly incorporating elements of a previous work into current projects. I tend to pick up on a particular motif or image or phrase or object that is peripheral in one work and use it as a central thing or a starting point for the next work. It's a big complicated mess. Also for me each work is often a reaction against the last work, like, oh, that work was so technically difficult, this one is going to be technically simple, etc etc. What's important to me is trying to build my own language. Each work adds to the bank of connotations and references in my brain that I kind of project onto each new work. I'd love to see what I would make if I lost my memory but still knew I was an artist. I'd probably make a landscape painting. How nice that would be. At the moment I don't have the patience to do a painting, I can barely concentrate on making a photograph. Tangents aside, though, the work I've showed at West Space, Way of a Pilgrim, was a bit of a breakthrough for me. It's been years since I made objects and I feel like I've opened up a whole range of syntactical possibilities by working with these small parts that can be kind of matched up together. I'm still very tied to photographic ways of thinking, though, representation and all that. I start a lot of things I don't finish too.

SR: Why did you want to become an artist?

EM: I fell into it.
Um, probably because I was studying poetry before and, relative to poetry, art seemed like a viable career choice. The reasons I had for starting art school ten years ago are probably quite different to the reasons why I've decided to stay an artist against all the odds. I like indulging my own uninterrupted internal monologue, self-centered as it sounds/is. Your art practice is something that you alone can control and you can choose to shape it in whatever way you're capable of. There aren't many fields that offer that kind of autonomy. Also, my approach to my practice is very scattered and if I were a filmmaker or a writer or whatever it would be because I was willing to stick to one medium but as an artist you can really do a lot of different things and call them all art.

SR: Have you been to any exhibitions recently that you had a strong response to? Could you tell us about it?

EM: To be quite honest, I've been very lax at attending other people's shows lately. I adored Rachel Scott's show at James Dorahy at the end of last year, she's doing great work at the moment. I've been enjoying a lot of performance that I've been seeing, I think it's sort of where it's at at the moment, a bit. Maybe that's just in Sydney, I don't know.

SR: Are there any projects or exhibitions that you are currently working on? Where and when can people see your work next?

EM: I'm making more fimo objects for a desk installation. I've got a solo show in the project space at MOP Projects in Sydney opening on August 9, and a show in the Cube at Canberra Contemporary Art Space in October, where I'll be re-showing my Masters work. I started doing some little stop motion animations recently but I'm kind of getting ahead of myself and have had to focus on the other work I'd planned for my MOP show. Once that show is done, I'm going to make some little animations in my studio, and some constructions based on visual merchandising (like in retail windows).

Link to Range of Motion, an exhibition at West Space involving Emma White, Madeleine Donovan and Penny Cain, 22 June - 14 July 2007.