“I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball…”
—William Blake
Artist Statement
Emma’s practice responds to Blake’s call to follow a golden string into the liminal. As a walking artist, her work unfolds through embodied movement across specific landscapes. Like a rhizome sprawling beneath the earth, her practice is non-linear, extending across media, time, and lived experience. Prints, pigments, poems, photographs, and sound form entangled layers of a living palimpsest shaped by place.
Rooted in process and shaped by risk, Emma’s work explores the relationship between outer and inner landscapes through haptic and somatic engagement. Walking operates as both method and material. Her work invites slow, embodied attention, asking how the land is felt as much as it is seen.
Working in conversation with the South Downs, the landscape she has grown up within, Emma collects and grinds earth pigments as a form of collaboration with the land itself. Photography, walking, and psychogeographic approaches intersect to trace moments of encounter and transformation. Monoprint introduces chance and unpredictability, opening a space for reflection and liminality. Poetry acts as the golden thread that stitches these elements together, weaving the inner and outer worlds.
The work is inherently site-specific and performative. Emma creates situations for encounter that unfold in real time. Viewers are invited to become active participants in ways that extend the work beyond the gallery space. The layered interactions emphasise embodiment and attentiveness, positioning the audience as present within the work rather than passive observers.
Emma seeks to exhibit her work in ways that remain authentic to its origins in walking and situated experience. The work resists neutral or detached display, instead favouring contexts that support participation, slowness, and engagement. Each piece forms part of an ongoing journey of self-discovery; a mapping of terrain and self that offers an invitation to follow a golden string through embodied, relational encounter.
