About
Emma is a British artist originally from Birmingham, UK and currently living and working from her studio in Italy. After graduating from Liverpool John Moores University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Emma worked in Birmingham for ten years. There she produced works in her studio, exhibited and worked on commissions. Simultaneously she also worked for galleries and managed one of Britain's largest commercial art galleries outside of London. She also worked for design companies, PR agencies and creative organisations. At this time her works were urban, city inspired landscapes & skylines. Emma has always been inspired by travel and culture which led her to travels around the world and a final big move to her childhood passion of Italy. Emma in the last eight years has personally restored a ruined stone farm house with traditional materials and set up her artist studio. The house is set in a few hectares of land that Emma works on and inspires her current work Constantly being surrounded by nature, this environment has determined a shift in content, her works now are centred around floral, botanical influences with acrylic and watercolour pieces on paper and canvas.
Artist statement
Custodian to an olive grove, I tend and prune the trees, my paintings reflect the natural environment, sensations, reflections of the sounds and scents, play on light, an appreciation of the therapeutic qualities of the natural world. I work on the balance between spontaneity and deliberation, on getting that alignment, I love the physical connection with the bigger works, the flow, fluidity against the stillness, loose over gusto, its all an experiment, breaking down the surface with conflict, ease, melting, satisfaction from a single sweeping chalk mark or line, the musicality is something I am very conscious of too, accessing deep within us, that guttural vibration, frequencies, the interconnection of movement, pattern, tone.
Working still in intermittent bursts, initial sketches are later adapted in an instinctive, immediate process, much of the aesthetic decision making is done in the moment - intuitively working. Bold, flat, graphic colour fields sit alongside swift, gestural marks contrasting with sharp punchy lines. Finding the balance in composition and palette, play on finding the humming, vibrating energy.
Still working with the forms in nature that shape my day, the seeds planted that form eddy, exultant swirls such as the echinacea’s conical heads, burnt orange vortexes that rise above drooping blades, I love to see the transformations, the sagging, wilting, crisp remains, where motion is fixed. Or the robust, vigour in the summer broom, oozing colour, bombastic in its popping projections of pollen, explosions of golden cadmium corollas & sweet vanilla scents. honey scented broom, ginestra, small yellow papillionaceaous flowers with cadmium yellow wings, oblong pods that twist & explode, popping citrus heads for heady bees, glorious summer.
Or the ancient, mythological fig, surrounded by many of these Neolithic, enigmatic trees, one of the first plants to be cultivated by mankind they exist in a complex co-evolution, symbiotic relationship with the fig wasp, neither can exist without the other, the female wasp enters to lay eggs losing her wings and antenna to never leave. The incredible part is that within the bulbous flesh form lies the flower, it never sees the light of day, this syconium blooms inside itself. What remains is a sweet, gooey honey fruit, soft malleable branches and grand lobed waving, curling leaves.
I have proud wild iris’s around the studio, trying to get a sense of light flickering through the leaves or the transparency of the delicate petals, the form of the flowers are so embodying, the curves and containers, the fuzzy beards, hafts & falls, trying to capture the droops and crests, sweeping, dissolving nature.
I work in a layering process but the acrylic paints allows for swathes of colour to be loaded on the brush, the layers give a sense of changing moods or opportunities to vary the mark making, sometimes loose, tenuous, other times with deliberate strength, freeing, spontaneous but also rooted in the natural shapes. The layering too is a way to break down the visual plane, separate the elements, that are independent but then merge, conflict, soothe, ease, melt into togetherness. There is great energy in creating. There is a rhythm in drawing and painting, patterns that follow nature itself. May they be irregular or repetitive, it is the play on finding a balance between the pleasure of making satisfying repetitions, visual symmetry to the more impulsive, spontaneous marks. Like beats & breaks, the guttural tones, ancestral tunes that vibrate and then in the knowing of where to break the visual space. The flow that nature & art provide, meandering, branching, that discernible regularity that is so soothing exquisitely combined with instinctive irregularity, the uncontrived, the push, it is in finding the harmony in the contradictions, trusting the inherent fluency that is in everything. That deeply sits in nature and in us all.
