UpsideDown Artwork

Emily Teall

Shelter (Remembering an Unhatched Caterpillar at Harbor Point)

Oil and gold leaf on canvas

36"x48"

$1500

Emily Teall

Shelter

Organic elements and curiosity about nature have driven my artworks since childhood. I navigate the themes of anxiety and memory through my artistic practice, drawing inspiration from anatomical and biological references and processes. My art draws on natural imagery of bulbs, cocoons, seedpods, and wombs to evoke a gestation period of introspection before re-emerging or growing into the community.

My most recent paintings use ecological symbolism to express hope and to memorialize important personal moments. When I hike, I find plants that inspire me, research them, and combine them to create meanings in my artwork. This painting features the reliance of a monarch chrysalis on common milkweed. Milkweed is well-known for nourishing migrating monarch butterflies and their larvae despite the toxic sap for which it is named. Like many toxic plants, milkweed is also medicinal. Last summer I regularly visited a monarch chrysalis by my climbing gym at Harbor Point. It was small and lovely—in person, both the chrysalis and my painting have small gold flecks that I’ve never seen elsewhere in nature. Most monarchs don’t survive to adulthood and a polluted roadside/harborside garden is not the ideal habitat. I watched the chrysalis deteriorate and it never hatched. This 36”x48” painting that is now on view at the Norwalk Art Space imagines and remembers the healthy chrysalis.

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