My current practice centres on large-scale drawing on paper, developed through doctoral research into relational and spatial methodologies. Working primarily with ink and graphite, I approach drawing not as illustration but as field — an expanded surface where gesture accumulates, disperses, and re-forms.

These works are often suspended or installed architecturally, allowing the paper to operate as both image and environment. Density and erasure, layering and interruption, function as material equivalents of lived movement — migration, return, displacement, and reorientation. The drawn mark becomes a trace of presence: bodily, historical, and ecological.

Influenced by relational thinking and questions of belonging, my practice asks how drawing can hold complexity without fixing it. Rather than presenting narrative resolution, the works remain open — porous surfaces where land, memory and embodied knowledge coexist.

Paper is central to this inquiry. It absorbs, buckles, carries weight. It holds water and resists it. In its fragility and scale, it mirrors the tensions between stability and precarity that shape contemporary experience.

Through installation and scale, the drawings invite viewers into a spatial encounter — not simply to look at an image, but to inhabit a shifting relational field.

C.V.

Emma Louise Pratt

New Zealand–born artist, based in the UK.

Working in large-scale drawing and installation

Representation

White Space Contemporary Art, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

Represented Artist, 2005–2022

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2025 — Installation, Cambridge Open Studios, Artspace, Cambridge, UK

2024 — Installation, Cambridge Open Studios, Artspace, Cambridge, UK

2023 — Exhibition as Conversation / Exhibition as Research, Cambridge Open Studios, UK

2019 — New Work on Paper, White Space Contemporary Art, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

2017 — Infinity Has No Centre, White Space Contemporary Art, Auckland

2014 — Postcards from the Garden of the Moorish King, White Space Gallery, Auckland

2013 — Witness, White Space Gallery, Auckland

2012 — Witness, Hastings City Art Gallery, Aotearoa New Zealand

2010 — Look Up Kathie, White Space Gallery, Auckland

2007 — The Island Dweller, White Space Gallery, Auckland

2005 — Ki a Te Popi, White Space Gallery, Auckland

Selected Group Exhibitions

2016 — Cinco Años, Wabi Sabi Gallery, Seville, Spain

2015 — Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh Art Fair, Edinburgh, UK

2015 — Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, UK

2007 — TJFA 10 Years Anniversary Exhibition, Taylor Jensen Gallery, Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand

2004 — Martinborough Gallery for Contemporary Art, Martinborough, Aotearoa New Zealand

Residencies & Projects

2018–present — Artists in Schools Project & Residency, Cambridge, UK

2018 — Artist in Residence, IATEFL International Conference, Brighton, UK

2007 — Sanlúcar Residency, Spain

Selected Talks & Conference Presentations

2025 — ASLE Conference, Dublin (Spoken Word)

2019 — IATEFL Conference, Liverpool, UK

2018 — Image Conference, Brussels, Belgium

2018 — Image Conference, Athens, Greece

2016 — Image Conference, Malta

2015 — Innovate ELT Conference, Barcelona, Spain

2014 — Learning Technology SIG, Dublin, Ireland

Earlier Exhibitions

Selected exhibitions (2001–2004) available on request.

Awards & Prizes (Selected)

2019 — Finalist, Parkin Drawing Prize, Aotearoa New Zealand

2014 — Finalist, Focus Abengoa International Painting Prize, Spain

2024 — Alumni Scholarship Recipient

2005 — Runner-up, Molly Morpeth Canaday Award, Aotearoa New Zealand