Emii Alrai’s River of Black Stone at Compton Verney by Dr. Kerry Harker
On an upper floor of the house, across three rooms painted in a progressively more oppressive palette – from pale blue to saturated carmine red and finally to dead ash black – Emii Alrai’s installation River of Black Stone leads us on an immersive journey deep into the dark heart of a fictional volcano conjured from recent research and fieldwork.
In the first room, a collection of large sculptures are propped stage-like from the floor and walls by metal supports and armatures. In earthy colours and with a textured finish that mimics stone, they resemble monolithic fragments from the facades of ancient architectures now entombed in the British Museum. Carved from polystyrene blocks skimmed with plaster or gypsum, they may also be light as wafers – their theatricality, heightened by dramatic spotlighting, wrong foots us from the start. Among this framework nestle smaller artefacts, vases and amphora. Many are the colour of verdigris, that vivid almost supernatural green of copper patinated by exposure to the atmosphere and time. A series of wall-based works resemble mosaics unearthed at archaeological sites but are in fact crafted from saltdough.
Emii Alrai, River of Black Stone at Compton Verney, 2025 © Compton Verney and Jamie Woodley
In the second room, the large sculptures give way to a series of plinths across which flow accretions of the eponymous black stone. Here and there gleaming glass vessels are held aloft from the lava flow by more metal armatures. Some hold stems of living lilies, their white petals stark against the deep red walls, the scene potent with their scent. Accompanying them are a series of framed silver gelatin prints that Alrai took on a research visit to Mount Etna on the east coast of Sicily, developed using the volcano’s fertile mineral ash.
Finally, in the third dark and tomb-like chamber, wall-based artefacts accompany a new multi-channel sound work The Ides of Somnolence, read by the artist and produced by Yasmeen Soudani. In this new text, the volcano is anthropomorphised at the moment of eruption. Skyward the lava roars and rages like a bruised and bloodied newborn, riotously disgorging itself from the womb of the Earth, severing its umbilical cord and proceeding across the landscape by the basest instincts of hunger and curiosity before it petrifies, only to endure a lonely sleep of a thousand long years before this cycle of release can begin once again.
Emii Alrai, River of Black Stone at Compton Verney, 2025 © Compton Verney and Jamie Woodley
This ambitious exhibition is conceived in response to Pierre Jacques Volaire’s painting in the sublime landscape tradition An Eruption of Vesuvius by Moonlight (1774) on display downstairs as part of Compton Verney’s Naples Collection. The erupting volcano, a paroxysm of orange and red, is depicted on the left of Volaire’s romanticised scene. Groups of tiny figures, silhouetted in the foreground against the molten torrent, observe the spectacle unfolding before them. Volaire made many such depictions, feeding a public fascination with volcanic eruptions that accompanied those of Vesuvius in the second half of the 18th Century. The visual iconography of these historic depictions endures in the popular western imagination through Hollywood films such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy of 2001-3.
Alrai gives such sensationalism an astute swerve. River of Black Stone deploys the artist’s now-signature aesthetic and conceptual strategies that will be familiar to those who have experienced her increasingly confident and expansive presentations over recent years. Basic materials are deployed to mimic museum artefacts and typologies of display, bringing them together in a critique of the western museological structure. New narratives are invented that blend high- and low-culture references, with research sources as disparate as American writer Susan Sontag, the 18th Century British diplomat and vulcanologist Sir William Hamilton, and American rapper Cardi B credited here. Sculptural forms from earlier shows are recycled and reshaped, loaded with the scars of their previous existence and the marks of the hands and tools that made them. The very foundations upon which our conceptions of identity and value rest are brought into question.
Born in Blackpool to Iraqi parents, Alrai’s experiences of growing up in small-town Scotland in a household that kept alive through dance, oral history and food the traditions of a culture she has never experienced first-hand, were formative for her adult sense of self. She has described these experiences as akin to being in two places at once and feels a sense of inherited nostalgia for a lost homeland that stood in romanticised contrast and offered freedom from a perceived lack of imagination in her immediate surroundings.[1] This upbringing was also formative for an emerging sense of self as artist, as Alrai learned how to carve plaster from her father, who learned the skill from his own father who had carved the façades of mosques in Baghdad. Following a fine art degree at Leeds, she worked as a registrar in the museums sector, completing an MA in Museum and Art Gallery Studies before focusing on her artistic practice. She has spoken about the tension between the very careful, methodical and contained work required of museum staff who care for these objects, and the chaotic and visceral space of the studio where hands and imagination have free rein to shape materials before breaking and remaking them at will.
River of Black Stone is a compelling exploration of all these experiences and more, building its effects through a rich and poetic layering of materials, forms, references and memories (lived and imagined) that shapeshift and take on different meanings over time. It invites us to think with the Artist about time and place, the hierarchies of value that we attach to materials and how we fabricate identities for ourselves. These windowless rooms at Compton Verney, their eyes closed to external realities, are the perfect setting for such intimate enquiries. Semi-derelict by the late 1980s before being bought by the Peter Moores Foundation in 1993 and later converted into an art gallery, this once-grand house is itself a ruin of sorts, a simulacra composited of many moments in its evolution over the last five hundred-plus years. It has its own stories of acquisition and accumulation, decay and renewal, to tell.
Alrai’s powerful installation does not drag us back to the volcano of childhood nightmares. Instead, it holds open and foments an imaginative space that she terms ‘brewing instability’. In her mature vision, it is a space of playful inventiveness where plaster can become stone and a thousand years can pass in an instant; where our feet can be planted on multiple geographies simultaneously; where the gaps between generations collapse and where identities are mutable and available to be cast anew. I had not yet figured the volcano as a site of optimistic renewal, but as Sontag writes in her 1992 historical novel The Volcano Lover, ‘Maybe it is not the destructiveness of the volcano that pleases most, though everyone loves a conflagration, but its defiance of the law of gravity to which every inorganic mass is subject.’ As a lament for an irrecoverable past, River of Black Stone strikes a note of melancholy. But possibility and hope for other futures, and a belief in the regenerative power of art, are defiantly present too.
River of Black Stone is at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, until 15 June 2025.
[1] River of Black Stone Exhibition: Interview with Artist Emii Alrai, Iraq International New Agency (2025) available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4m-CW2KGJE.