In The Studio With Troy Emery as he creates The Neighbour for Tidal Wave

Maybe This Is a Pearl Cat: Troy Emery’s The Neighbour

Invited to paint on a baroque pearl for Tidal Wave, Troy Emery covered a creature in them instead. Melanie Katsalidis went to his Brunswick studio to see what she had started.

For a few hundred years, Europe catalogued the natural world by guessing. A narwhal tusk was sold as a unicorn horn. An irregular pearl was turned over in the hand until it resembled something, and a goldsmith built the rest of the animal around it, so the pearl became the chest of a lion, or the legs of a cat.

Troy Emery loves this. "Maybe this is a pearl cat," he says, standing over the creature he has made for Tidal Wave. "Or some kind of pearl growth happening on this figure." Something cryptozoological, catalogued by someone who guessed.

The invitation had gone out from Melanie Katsalidis earlier in the year: nine Australian artists, baroque pearls each, and a brief to paint directly onto them. Emery was the only one who did not. "I do need to admit that when invited to Tidal Wave, I didn't quite read the brief as thoroughly as maybe I was intended to," he says. Melanie was delighted. Working with artists from outside the jewellery world is the point of the exhibition, she says, and then seeing where they take it.

So in July she went to Brunswick. The studio was in one of its fuller phases that morning, materials in one corner, work in another, the whole thing shifting week to week. Emery described it as an evolving mess that fills up, empties out and fills again. "Like a tide," Melanie offered, which for this particular exhibition was better luck than either of them planned.

Covering forms is what Emery does. His creatures are built up and then buried under mass-produced craft supplies: hundreds of metres of tassels, thousands of pom-poms, and more recently glass beads. "It's all about volume," he says. He calls the method fake taxidermy. The armatures are polyurethane mannequins from the American hunting trade, designed to be skinned over, which he rebuilds and then wraps, pins, glues and staples into place. What emerges is a new skin given to an animal that was never there.

The Neighbour (2026) is four-legged, faceless and completely obscured beneath long black glass bead fringing. Twenty-nine baroque pearls are scattered across its back and flanks. Emery had planned to cluster them at the throat and changed his mind. Gathered at the neck they would have read as a growth. Scattered, they read as markings. "It looks properly adorned then," Melanie said, turning it. "It's a coat."

The pearls are close to five centimetres across. "Almost like a poached egg," as he puts it, and the comparison is less irreverent than it sounds. Baroque pearls are the ones that refuse the mould, and Emery is interested in exactly that refusal. "The fashion is for the perfect pearl, and that is the valued one," he says. "And then these are somehow the discarded pearls that don't fit in that category. Whereas maybe historically the baroque pearl was the special pearl, and the round pearl was just the generic version."

Which is the inversion the work turns on. The Renaissance goldsmith started with a pearl and reasoned outwards to an animal. Emery starts with an animal and buries it, so the guesswork runs the other way: not what is this pearl shaped like, but what kind of creature grows these.

Real pearls are also new to him. Early in his practice he used plastic ones. "The pearl is really the antithesis of a pom-pom," he says. "But it's still functionally the same. It's a thing that gets stuck on a form, or on a body, or on a garment, and it serves the same purpose. I really like that duality between high and low."

What the project has opened up, he says, is scale. Not one creature with twenty-nine pearls, but a piece made entirely of them. Pearl fringing, pearl rope, thousands of them, the way he uses everything else. Emery describes his practice as colliding elements of decorative arts into a contemporary art mode of display. Pearls have belonged to the first category for centuries. The Neighbour is what happens when they are put to work in the second.

Tidal Wave runs 13 to 29 August 2026 at Pieces of Eight, 28 Russell Place, Melbourne.