‘Listening for a Heartbeat’
And when all went quiet and we could no longer make out the sound of these murmurings, I leaned back just a little into the spine that curved against my spine, and I said to the heart outside myself, “Where are you?” And the heart outside myself said, “I’m right here. Where are you?” And I said, “I’m right here, too.” And that’s how I knew I was alive and of the world. That I was nothing less and nothing more than everything that had already been, and everything that would ever be. Who I was was happening, and this happening could never be undone.
Listening for a Heartbeat brings together a collection of Hawai‘i artist Emily McIlroy’s mixed-media drawings and paintings, spanning the years from 2008 to 2021. McIlroy’s art practice is rooted in her relationship with the natural world and fueled by internal exploration. With the deaths of her twin brother (2007), mother (2015), and father (2019), McIlroy came to see her inner realm of thoughts, memories, and emotions as a wilderness—a space that harbors great danger as well as extraordinary wonder.
The works in this exhibition are McIlroy’s attempt to navigate and understand this territory. They orient her towards truths that lie outside the light of full awareness. Each piece or series of pieces arose out of inquiry into existential questions. In the years following the death of her twin, who had suffered from mental illness for many years, McIlroy was left suspended between a world she could not yet enter and a world to which she no longer felt she belonged. “Where am I,” she asked herself, “if not fully here nor there?” Drawing on a repertoire of seemingly unearthly imagery, she sought to conjure a world of in-betweens, a place unmoored from the familiar physics of everyday life and defined by a sense of pervasive liminality.
The artist’s desire to make sense of the human mind and mortality took on an increased sense of gravity with the unexpected death of her mother in 2015. “Who was my brother? Who was my mother? Who are any of us, anyway?” She decided to approach the question “Who am I?” as a spiritual invocation, as a petition for help from deep within an intensifying feeling of helplessness. She began painting prayers—painting in prayer. Maybe the quest to pray without ceasing was a way out of madness.
After the sudden death of her father in 2019, the last member of her immediate family, McIlroy turned to animals and animal energies as a way of expanding her notion of what family could mean. “What is kinship? Who and why does it include, and how?” The works created between 2019 and 2021 look beyond the human world to explore ancestral, contemporaneous, and energetic relationships with nonhuman beings and entities.
Listening for a Heartbeat presents an arc of profound and extended inquiry—a journey of loss, grief, love, and transformation.
McIlroy states: “I use the practice of drawing and painting as a means of communion with the world around me, and the world within myself. Through creating, I come into intimate contact with things that exist beyond my understanding. I paint to bring the deepest and most elusive parts of myself into the shared world of flesh. I paint to become.”
