Paintings by Emily Hillier

About

Emily's paintings aim to explore the artificiality of a painted representation. By working within the traditional categories of portraits, landscapes and still-lifes, the artist's paintings explore the sensuality of paint and challenge habitual responses towards figurative painting. Emily's paintings are not a reproduction of reality but of my perception, by using the medium of paint she is able to manipulate the image to eliminate the sentimental and a distinct narrative. As a collection they seek to reinforce an overall meaning, like clues they are to be read and interpreted. 

Emily searches for malleable forms to represent, the beginning of a process of metamorphoses. Working with images already distanced from reality; caught floating on a website or in a friends album, they have become less sentimental. The image then transposed onto the painted surface is an act of literally pushing coloured mud over a canvas in my depictions of mud. The banality of her subject matter leaves space for mystery to be discovered within the materiality of the painted image.

'A painting is then seen as a poignant object rather than a picture of the world'.