Emily Besser
ARTIST STATEMENT
Emily Besser is an artist living and working on Gadigal land, Warrane/Sydney. She is interested in the ways that drawing and painting interact and diverge from one another. Using the picture plane as a space to map and question the self and experience, Besser builds up a surface, sometimes to the point of collapse, using layers of motifs, colour and pattern that she finds in her surroundings.
Drawing is at the heart of Besser’s practice. Her drawings can also include collage and other mixed-media. Working across different mediums, Besser approaches the surface of the picture plane as holding unlimited possibilities. She builds up the ‘noise’ of a surface through improvisation, using dense layers of personal motifs, colour and patterns gleaned from her environment, both natural and urban.
Using materials in experimental and unconventional ways, her unplanned surfaces are encoded with her thinking and feeling processes. Colour, shape and pattern is built and re-built many times, holding tenuously to the grid as the omnipresent structure of the visual plane.
In her recent works, the wobbly-colourwheel and flower motifs emerged from studying her grandmother’s embroidery. A prolific embroideress, Shirley Darby taught her grand-daughter how to use colour and shape as a visual language.
BIO
Emily Besser graduated from Sydney College of the Arts, Rozelle with First Class Honours in Painting, going on to study and practice environmental and native title law.
Shifting back to a studio practice after having children, Emily now practices as an Artist-Educator at museums and galleries in Sydney.
image credit: Samee Lapham
Past Exhibitions
Artworks
