Photos: Art Professor Solomon Presents “Sweet Honeyed Homelands” Collection at Bobbitt

January 30, 2023 Naomi Cloostermans Arts/Culture, Features, Photos 0

The front of the “Sweet Honeyed Homelands” collection program. The program, like the art, is simple yet intriguing (Photo by Naomi Cloostermans).

On Friday, the Bobbit Visual Arts Center presented the art of Emmeline Solomon called “Sweet Honeyed Homelands.” Solomon is an artist who works at Albion College as an assistant professor of art, as well as being the curator of the college’s print collection.

Solomon said she uses art as a means of expressing herself. 

“In the same way that an author or poet uses language to explore the world, visual art is the language that I can use to speak about ideas/thoughts/feelings/etc,” Solomon stated on her website. Speaking about “Sweet Honeyed Homelands,” Solomon said, “There wasn’t a single moment or turning point where I made a conscious decision, and much as an eventual coming to terms with it.” 

Solomon said two factors inspired her to name her collection “Sweet Honeyed Homelands.” 

“All pieces in this show reference, in some capacity, the space between reality and an imagined Space,” her website states. “A sweet honeyed homeland is unreachable inherently because it never truly existed, so these are all works that are struggling to create meaning within the space between the real and the impossible.”

The other reason for the title?

“The second reason is much more shallow: The sound of those words strung together are pleasing to me,” said Solomon. 

Solomon’s art is centered around an overarching theme of failure – the failure to access the things we want to access.

Solomon said she was inspired by “living a human life, being a person who cannot access any of those things that she wanted to access because it’s perhaps inevitably unreachable”. 

Solomon said that her collection could relate to anyone and everyone “unless you have a really, really good, healthy relationship with the past, which I would argue almost nobody has because it’s far away.” 

She said that “even if we think we have a great relationship with the past, there’s still an inherent removal which is frustrating in and of itself; that’s a failure even just because we cannot truly access it.”

This 2019 tableau named “Silence at the Center of the Onion,” shows two wrists clasped together by rope; the hands are placed in a praying position. “We are always new and it is always the end of the world, but there is still silence at the center of the onion,” Solomon said (Photo by Naomi Cloostermans).
Part one of “Casual Idolatry (state 2),” created in 2022, displays a series of drawings one after the other. The drawings demonstrate tea bags changing as they tell a story (Photo by Naomi Cloostermans).
Part two of ‘Casual Idolatry (state 2) demonstrates a piece of paper with writing on it, describing each and every drawing above as they change and evolve (Photo by Naomi Cloostermans).
Solomon’s “Chironomia 1” and “Chironomia 2” depict hands interacting with dynamic pieces of cloth (Photo by Naomi Cloostermans).
A crocheted handkerchief titled “Telling the Bees,” was created in 2016 (Photo by Naomi Cloostermans).
These tableaus, named “Postmemory Seeks Connection,” display a story in which two children stand. They demonstrate how the memory creates what it cannot recover (Photo by Naomi Cloostermans).
“Dawn” shows a pomegranate cut in half, spilling out its seeds. The description of this piece is simply “{…}” (Photo by Naomi Cloostermans).
About Naomi Cloostermans 10 Articles
Naomi Cloostermans is a sophomore from Brussels, Belgium. She is majoring in Environmental Science and minoring in Communications. In her free time, she likes to travel and explore new places. She plans on attending graduate school after graduating. Contact Naomi via email at NC11@albion.edu.

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