I meet Emma Talbot at Compton Verney a day before the official opening of her exhibition How We Learn to Love, her largest UK exhibition to date. Talbot moves between studios in London and Italy, and has a simultaneous solo exhibition in Copenhagen Contemporary and a solo presentation at Centraal Museum Utrecht. I imagine she must be busy, but she generously shows me around the entire exhibition before we sit down to talk on a bench outside.

The exhibition brings together more than 20 new and recent works, including her trademark installations comprising paintings, fabric sculptures on colourful plinths, animations and a new series of drawings. In Talbot’s work the same figure appears, a stylised female with long, sleek hair. “She is an idea of how I imagine myself from the inside,” Talbot says. “That is why she never has a face.” Talbot paints on silk, the process resembling drawing in its fluency and immediacy and resulting in a luminosity and vibrancy of colour that is distinctly hers. The female protagonist makes her way through richly imagined landscapes of colourful patterns, interspersed by bubbles of text. The playful, child-like handwriting betrays its profound philosophical and emotional content, inspired by extensive research.

Read my interview at Studio International