Based in the North Cotswolds, Emily creates abstract works built in layers of modelling paste, glaze and a cream drawn from the local limestone, then scraped and sanded back so that earlier marks rise through the later ones. Over the weathered ground she places a few weighted black forms, small fragments of colour and a single red line, positioned on the golden ratio and the older sacred geometry long used to give order to buildings and images. The work moves between two series. The Still Point is open and restrained, a few forms weighed against a great deal of quiet ground. Palimpest is layered and dense, with fragments and earlier surfaces rising through the paint.

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Emily has worked in psychiatry for thirteen years and is a registered integrative psychotherapist and occupational therapist. When she’s not painting, she listens to the stories people tell and witnesses them bring to light the parts of themselves that have been abandoned or lost, so that they might find a transcendence and a new relationship with their experience.

Her paintings come from the same attention. Each canvas holds many parts at once and she is interested in the interplay between them: The structure, the line and the measured placement sit where the more conscious parts of the psyche might, explicit and deliberate. While the layered and half-buried ground carries what is less known and more tacit, the structure we sense before we can say it. A window of colours opens like a portal beneath the surface, a hidden eye waits to be found, and a crack is filled with gold, so that the conscious and the unconscious share one space.

“Story runs through all of it. Myth, legend and the symbolic language of many traditions shape the titles, because these old stories remain so entwined with the human psyche. One of the oldest, the image of the cave in which people take shadows for the world until they turn towards the light, sits close to what I hope the paintings might invite; a turning and a slower looking, in which what was held in the shadow comes into view. The works holds a balance between chaos and order, the worked surface pressing against the geometry that contains it. The red line comes from alchemy, where red marked the bringing together of separate parts, so I use it as a thread of continuity that never quite arrives.”