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A Narrow Escape


Project Summary
A Narrow Escape explores cyclical anxiety, superstition, and the illusion of control through a multimedia installation of ceramics, animation and painting, that interrogate our fears of inevitable, unfortunate ends.

Project Brief
Understanding superstitious acts and coping behaviours as more than futile attempts to control the inevitable, A Narrow Escape examines absurd responses to overwhelming anxiety and the way these attempts at control can ultimately reinforce our fate.


This exhibition draws parallels between these behaviours and visual disturbances such as migraine auras, blind spots, visual static, tunnel vision and afterimages. Both distort how we process overwhelming information and are adaptive yet disruptive responses. With fractured compositions and oscillating layers, oil paintings explore reactions to death from denial through to obsession, using optical disturbances and illusions to visualise subconscious cycles of anxiety.

Horror provides another structure through which anxiety can be deliberately contained. Drawing on imagery preceding a stereotypical jump scare - an ominous corner, a dead end, a looming shadow - this exhibition also investigates the counterintuitive relationship between horror movies and anxiety. As a faux death-defying experience, horror movies are a cathartic way to safely activate adrenaline-fueled survival instincts in a kind of contained panic.

Weaving links between horror movies, superstitions, perceptual disruption, and optical illusions, A Narrow Escape explores patterns of anxiety as a series of detours, false exits, and traps. What emerges are instinctive reactions that promise escape or control, while repeatedly leading back to the inevitable.

Installation Plan and Requirements
This immersive, multimedia installation will haunt Blindside with ceramics, possess the walls with animation projections and nonsense diagrams, and Frankenstein painting and collage together through ambitious experimentation that combines materials in innovative ways.

  • Medium-scale collage-based oil paintings with sculptural ceramic stands
  • Projected hand-painted animation 
  • Large-scale collage-based multimedia paintings suspended from (artist owned) metal stands 

CV

CV_Emma Lyn Winkler

Support Material


Bio
Dancing around themes of death and futility, Emma’s collage-based practice explores the intersections of painting, ceramics, and animation. Her iterative process layers personal photographs, developmental diagrams, and a found-imagery database to create works shaped by personal narratives of anxiety and mental ill-health.

Her recent work considers the trap of using avoidance to comfort oneself when confronted with death. This series explores manifestations of anxiety that drive a paradoxical desire for control in the face of mortality, within an ongoing examination of incongruous coping behaviours as instinctive responses.

Using humour and absurdism to explore incongruous reactions to uncertainty, through medieval-inspired ceramics, nonsense diagrams, fragmented paintings and slapstick animations, her work find humour in the inevitable.


To be exhibited 

Sleight of Hand

* Hero image (Linked)

Blind Spot (2026) oil and spray paint on canvas, 210 x 129 cm A Narrow Escape (2025) oil on canvas, 36 x 36 cm.


Indicative work

Nonsense Diagram: Key Terms


What Remains 


Deathbed (2025) oil and spray paint on canvas, chain and brass locks, 210 x 129 cm


It’s All Soup in the End




A Mere Passing Thing

Entropy, Rumination, Disintegration and Fulminating (2022) oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas and hand-painted stop motion animation, dimensions variable.


Buried Alive


Buried Alive and Claws out (2025) oil on canvas, glazed ceramic stand, dimensions variable.


Proposed Timeline


MONTH 1: Research and Development
  • Deepen research into horror tropes, optical illusions, visual games, etc.
  • Source and collect materials for experimentation
  • Plan and sketch initial ideas for each medium and multimedia combinations
  • Develop and finalise nonsense diagrams

MONTH 2: Material Experimentation
  • Conduct small-scale multimedia experiments
  • Document tests and refine  
  • Develop detailed storyboard for stop-motion animation

MONTH 3: Drafts and Tests
  • Create detailed plans for final hybrid works 
  • Build props and set elements for stop-motion video
  • Test interactions between physical works and moving image (projections, shadowplay)
  • Create digital animation draft
  • Finalise script and animation tests
  • Seek feedback - invite friends and mentors to studio space

MONTHS 4–5: Major Production Phase
Video work:
  • Animate stop-motion
  • Edit footage

Multimedia works:
  • Construct full-scale hybrid works
  • Integrate video projections and any other exterior elements

MONTH 6: Refining and Installation Testing
  • Final video editing and sound design
  • Final refinements to sculptural and multimedia works
  • Test installation: lighting, AV integration, interactivity
  • Photography and documentation of finished works