The Den

Emma Phillips

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.