24 yrs old

Living and working in Liverpool.

Part of Elevator Studios in the Novas Contempory Arts Centre on Parliment St, Liverpool.

Also working part time for TATE Liverpool.

I am what I do. To put everything into something that you do takes a lot. To be what you do takes even more. I take my life and paint with it. My work is a hybrid practice that draws together the genres of painting, sculpture and textiles. It is an expanded practice, but draws mostly on the principles of painting. It is a complex, yet decorative practice that maintains a highly feminine quality. It deals with identity and the idea of a feminine space within painting.

Is it painting at all? Only a woman can paint like this; she does not seem to follow any of the rules of art. (Paul Good, on the paintings of Pia Fries)

My life experience feeds directly into my work. Without painting and creating I feel like my mind would be blocked up with all the emotions and feelings that are still clogging it. I take bad feelings and hurt, experiences and memories of the past and turn them into an object of worth. The creating process, heals the wounds that are still open and bleeding, until they become scars. The scars are then memories of the past but they have been put right in my mind, so I can store it away at the back of my mind as experiences to learn from and build on.

When I was little, my mum used to sew all the time, making our clothes and her own. I grew up in a home of thrift make do and mend. For me creating is a way of returning to that innocent age where all around me things where being made, created and brought to life. The use of textiles is important within my work, as I feel it feeds straight from my upbringing and connects my work directly to my past. I need this connection of innocence past to make my work real, as my deepest memories are rooted here.

Pia Fries is an artist that has strongly influenced my work. The free reign that Pia Fries gives the paint, and symbolic values of colour are something that I take into my own practice. I take more from her later work (mid 1990s till present), as her use of the white space of the canvas is of great interest to me. Fries uses the white ground of the canvas as a stage, for the paint to perform. This sense of spatial awareness is an issue that I am still trying to perfect in my own work. Another artist that has strongly influenced me, is Beatriz Milhazes, specifically her desire to keep her techniques away from the masculine dominated area of painting, as well as her use of over-decoration, and colour.

Emma Sumner