‘A sign to look out for 1’, 24 x 18 cm, Acrylic and sand on cotton canvas, 2025

In her most recent body of work, Emma Sloth draws inspiration from the historical fascination with interpreting signs as omens of the future, a phenomenon that proliferated throughout fifteenth-century Europe. During this period, pamphlets circulated widely, detailing divine portents and extraordinary occurrences, ranging from natural phenomena to inexplicable coincidences, which were believed to foretell impending events, often associated with visions of apocalypse or divine judgment.

In their contemporary context, such signs were understood not merely as warnings, but as tools of preparation, as ways to anticipate and possibly mitigate future catastrophe. The prevailing ideology imbued disaster with purpose, suggesting that calamity could cleanse or renew, echoing the biblical narrative of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood that washed away sin to allow for a new beginning.

These pamphlets, and the worldview they propagated, functioned as responses to crises of their own time and attempts to reassert meaning and agency amid uncertainty. Sloth revisits this historical impulse to locate order within chaos, revealing a pattern of human behavior that persists today: the desire to decode the unknown as a means of reclaiming control over an unstable present.

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