Emma Phillips

Emma Phillips

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Degree: BA Painting
University: UAL Wimbledon
Graduation Year: 2021

New Blood Art Commentary

The horse is half-spirit, half-ritual object – a guardian of the passage between the living and the mythic. The still lakes and windows hold a similar charge: portals that look calm, the calm itself feels dreamlike, uncanny, as though time has stalled to let something surface.

There’s reverence here, – as if she’s painting the pause before invocation. Even the mussel shell, split open, echoes that theme: thresholds, interiors exposed, something waiting to speak.

You can feel how the folklore of Snowdonia is being filtered through her. The palette keeps the work awake in this time – acid-clean blues, lilacs, greens – while the imagery pulls from something ancient and half-remembered. 

It’s like she’s staging ritual within the grammar of modernity: flat planes, precise edges, pared forms. The land distilled, almost domesticated, then made strange again.

That stillness feels earned. The way still water holds reflection just before it shifts – a psychological suspension.

She paints the pause between worlds, but in HD.

Artist Statement

I am a British artist and curator living and working in East London, with a BA in Painting from UAL Wimbledon. My practice addresses psychologies of space, and the landscape as narrative, seeking to retell stories embedded in the land through painting, whether these be personal, mythological, or ecological, serving to bring out the sense of awe, divinity, or darkness of a landscape that is becoming increasingly homogenised, mundane, and devoid of wildness and wonder. My most recent body of work is based on the landscape and folklore of Snowdonia, Wales, where i undertook a residency in 2024.

Combining imagery from my lived experience with references to classic literature and film, I question the tensions that arise between popular representations of the land and its present reality, as well as the role of landscape painting in shaping these understandings of place and cultural identity.  

 

Solo Exhibitions

(2023) Gloaming, Broadway Gallery, Hertfordshire

Group Exhibitions

(2025) Summer Exhibition, Three Rooms Gallery, London

(2025) YesArt Fair, Artillery Arts, London

(2025) Despite II, Ethereal Maison Gallery, London

(2024) Papercuts, Aberystwyth School of Art, Aberystwyth

(2024) This is Earthly Stuff, AMP Gallery, London

(2023) Down the Garden Path, Safehouse 1, London

(2023) Shapes and Things, AMP Studios, London

(2022) The Letchworth Open, Broadway Gallery, Hertfordshire

(2022) Soft Earth, Espacio Gallery, London

(2021) Memento Mori, AIR Gallery, Manchester

(2021) Final Notice, Wimbledon College of Art, London

(2020) Xhibit 2020, UAL, Online

(2018) RBA Rising Stars, The Framers Gallery, London

(2018) Oaklands Auction 2018, St Albans Cathedral, Hertfordshire

(2018) 301st Annual Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London

Competitions, Prizes & Awards

(2023) Broadway Gallery Bursary Prize

(2020) Prunella Clough Painting Prize

(2018) RBA Rising Stars

(2024) Mawddach Residency

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