Emmanuel Guy

Emmanuel Guy is the AoMO Heather Hopfl Artist in Residence 2016-2018.

As an artist, I began as a woodworker. I work with restored antique hand tools to produced functional furniture with modern aesthetic. My practice is evolving towards art installation; using traditional woodworking techniques to produce wearable, kinetic or interactive sculptures. As an academic, I made contributions on the influence of discourses and institutional culture in the evolution of shipping policies and markets. My current work proposes to view policy making as spaces for individual stakeholders to (re)appropriate the strong paradoxes embedded in their industrial identity. My residence will be the beginning of an exploration on how these two practices relate to each other.

In Bled, I will design and build a chair using locally available wood. I will work in situ with hand tools only aiming to translate some of the energy of the conference and its setting into a functional art piece. In doing so I will raise two questions. What about craft? While it encompasses all the artistic questioning of sense, it is necessarily rooted in technics, functionality and traditions. Does factoring these material dimensions changes how we think of art and organizations? And what about chairs? There are highly sculptural by nature and must work with the human body, but they are also highly political: often strong symbols of power. What paradoxes do they hold?






Emmanuel Guy is the AoMO Heather Hopfl Artist in Residence 2016-2018. He will be working throughout the conference and we encourage delegates to engage with him and his artwork as much as possible! Emmanuel will present ‘the chair’ on Sunday 4th September and speak about his craft, the conference experience and how he sees the Artist in Residency working for him and the AoMO community!