‘I’m scared and my work reflects that’: the artist painting heavy questions onto the lightness of silk

Across Europe, Emma Talbot’s striking works fill galleries with dazzling images and telling questions, all painted onto a rather unusual material. She talks us through her dark obsessions – and the tragedy that changed everything

It might seem shocking, at first, for an artist to use her own children as models in a work based on Medea, a mother from Greek myth who kills her sons. “They noticed the likeness in my work,” says Emma Talbot. “And I had to say, ‘Yes, it’s you.’” Talbot, whose first large-scale UK show has just opened at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, adds: “But when I think of ‘sons’, they’re the sons that come to mind. It was inevitable the images would be of them.”

There’s another reason. The installation in which they appear – The Tragedies – is a tent-like, silk structure painted with intricate, swirling images interspersed with short texts: “Why should there be war?”; “Why fill the future with grief and regret?”; “What does war resolve?” These are the questions Talbot believes we should all be asking ourselves, at a time when the UK has been mooting the possibility of conscription. “It is a tragedy,” she says. “When they said that, I immediately thought of my sons, both in their mid 20s. It feels personal. These are my sons they’d be sending off to war.”