Born Melbourne in 1972, Emily Floyd is Senior Lecturer in the School of Fine Art at Monash Art Design & Architecture (MADA), Monash University. She is also a 2015 Sidney Myer Creative Fellow. Floyd has been working in sculpture, installation, print-making and public art, and is renowned for her text-based sculptures and pedagogically inspired works that combine formal concerns with an interest in the legacies of modernism. Intersecting public space with carefully considered design, she creates bold spaces for public engagement and interaction.

Examples of Floyd’s art are present in major public collections in Australia and internationally, including: Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), The British Council (United Kingdom), The British Museum (London), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), Monash University Collection (Melbourne), Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), GOMA / Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane); and prominent private and corporate collections.

• Featured above: The Outsider (2006) polyurethane on wood synthetic polymer paint and lacquer. This work takes Algerian author Albert Camus’s novel ‘The Outsider’ (1942) as its starting point. In Floyd’s interpretation of this existentialist text, sentences from the novel suggest the coastline and urban centre of Algiers (the setting of the book); through a mass of toy-like building blocks; Some instances and precise phrases from the novel are evident, while at other times words collapse into indecipherable piles. presenting language in a material form. Floyd invites active participation from the viewer in the construction of meaning.
• A Human Scale (2014) comprises 15 opaque synthetic polymer resin and bonded aluminium bronze LEDs. With this commission, Floyd investigates the potential of public art to activate urban spaces. The work’s title is drawn from the community based campaigns that emerged in response to the development of housing commission buildings in Melbourne and Sydney in the 1960s.

I am glad I did not avoid
Floyd’s abstract humanoid
installations that were employed
which I thoroughly enjoyed.

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