Emma is a multimedia artist and illustrator preoccupied with our attachment to people, places and especially, things.
For her, the arts elevate the everyday, even the mundane, through communication in a theatrical manner. Absence, loss and memory are core themes during investigations into the transmogrification of the everyday to the theatrical. The ethereal experience of an audience when viewing performance arts inspires Emma's research, with a focus on dramatisation of the mundane.
Consolidating a network of interconnected research threads with experimental image making; absence, loss and memory are recurring themes in Emma's work which often responds to personal archives. Loaded objects serve as a physical manifestation of a moment in time
– an extension of the ‘self’ now departed.
Emma's practice seeks to explore how, although the body of the viewer may be in one place, the mind is transported to another by the image - one personal to the individual and influenced by their own life experience and memories.
Concerned with the physical and metaphysical ‘weight’ of accumulation, she questions the materiality of memory, with landscape playing an important role in the visual language.
Often leaning into production techniques across printmaking and collage provides a level of tension vital to the artistic process.
Creation of the work serves as a way to make sense of her place in the world, through re-cataloguing the souvenirs of life’s journey. Recent work responds to the words of Penelope Lively who suggested that we don’t remember childhood, we imagine it*.
*Penelope Lively; Moon Tiger, 2018