BIOGRAPHY

Camilla Emson’s practice considers the body as an intelligent vessel. Her appropriation of unfamiliar tools and multi-disciplinary practice calls forward her body as an intuitive storyteller.

Emson’s visually powerful and intricate works explore the transformative relationship between mind and experience.  The artist employs notions of ‘play, participation and performance’ into her multi-disciplinary practice, which she exploits to investigate and shape the ‘maps of experience’.

Emson’s appropriation of unfamiliar tools and processes transform her canvas-based works into sculptural paintings. The works are laden with meaning expressed through the intricate needlework and stitching that scar the canvas. Her works examine the way in which memories are ‘woven into the body, like imprints’ on the nervous system.

The ruptured surface of raw canvas lends itself as a metaphor for man's impact on the world, and its need for repair. Emson unlocks a state of imperfection and incompleteness in which humans reside exposing the fragility of both man and the world.

Her early exposure to therapeutic contexts has moved Emson to make work that undresses the false comforts of modern society to reveal a delicate reality. For Emson the body, its scars and imperfections, reincarnates as a metaphor for human experience.

The artist also considers the making process a Live Art that needs to be documented and at times performed. Her recent performances including Heart as Informer demonstrates how the body is both material and tool, that which sculpts and is sculpted into existence. Her exploration of the individual transposes itself to the collective and engages with the audience on a dual symbiotic level. 

Emson is a trained dance movement psychotherapist and somatic experiencing (trauma healing) practitioner and is motivated by cutting edge research that says we remain plastic throughout life.