Emma Louise Pratt Painting & Drawing Projects

2024 Shapeshifting Dancing Landscape

At a subatomic level, we are everywhere, all at once. We are a mass of small universes… a multiverse. In the ecologies that make up who we are, and where we are, there are collisions, vibrations, ripples and reverberations. We used to think that an elephant held up the world, and an elephant held up that elephant and so on. We are only just beginning to understand the complexity, built on complexity, supported by yet more complexity, that is us.

New exploration with the Pōhutukawa: Metrosideros Excelsa found in A Coruña, Spain as a starting point. Looking at notions of identity and place in a world where we can collapse directions and locations, unfixing them from traditional marks.

Shapeshifting dancing landscape: Acryllic and Graphite on canvas. approx 200cm x 150cm, Emma Louise Pratt 2024

Pōhutukawa: Metrosideros Excelsa: graphite on Yupo paper, Emma Louise Pratt 2024

2020 Stories from the Deep Blue

I wander in my mind and find myself flying over the Pacific or submerged under waves, making ripples, remembering blessings and warnings, stories and moments when the natural world told me I was not alone but instead an interconnected piece of an expanding, living universe.

These are short video stories, sometimes with young collaborators and sometimes not. Some stories include and are based around a painting, while others draw on illustrations and digital media.

Phosphorescence: 2020: When I daydream at the moment, I often drift off to the ocean at home. I am thinking of one night, long, long ago in the first days of the new year. I am out in the bay in the dark alone in a kayak, watching the phosphorescence swirl with each stroke.

On Belonging, Connection and Place: Migration and Movement Histories Project 2020

The Wednesday Group

In response to a desperate need for housing in the UK, Cambridge has expanded by thousands of homes in the last six years, growing at a rate of 11,000 people per year. The rate of housing and new people arriving to take up residence in these areas has left us with many wants and needs in terms of community or sense of place. Even simple infrastructure is still missing. Our community in the South of Cambridge is very diverse, most of us migrants and the vast majority of us have not lived in this particular area for more than five years.

A We-ness.

We come together, to not be alone. Many of us are isolated linguistically and culturally, or through the simple job of raising young children at home. We live our isolated lives in boxes, either stacked on top of each other or side by side, dislocated from family groups and old friends. Isolation in all its shades has been a keyword in many conversations the volunteers have had with the people who attend the Wednesday group.

June 2020: Covid-19 and Lockdown

The Covid-19 pandemic has put a halt to any gathering. So, our Wednesday Group has ceased to gather. Some of the coordinators have tried online gatherings to sing with the children, but this is not an easy medium and people are tired. We wait.

2018 Artists in Schools Projects

For nine months, every Wednesday or Thursday morning and through lunchtime, I set up my drawing studio at a local primary school. I focused on drawing the local River Cam. Meanwhile, children came to draw beside me, with me and even on my work as I made it. During this unstructured time, we talked, we calmed ourselves, we got into the zone...

Workshop + IATEFL Artist in Residence & Athens Image Conference 2018

I was invited to be the inaugural artist in residence at the IATEFL Conference in Brighton in April 2018. It’s an exciting opportunity to explore three areas of interest. First is multimodal literacy, where we consider images, how we learn to read them and how we produce them as one of many languages we learn. Secondly as an artist and language lover, how the importance of play in learning, helps us. Creatief process has it’s essence in play and I think there is a lot to learn from it. Thirdly, the role of the teaching artist or teaching artistry, where workshop and teaching forms a part of the artists’ creative practice.

One day before the conference, a lot of special interest groups gathered for talks, workshops and seminars. I ran a workshop specifically for the Global Issues Special Interest Group (GISIG).

Ways of Seeing: Drawing as Total Physical Response Workshop

In Athens October 2018, I gave a workshop that looked at drawing as a physical response, not just a visual one. The objective was to highlight drawing as a tool in the classroom for communication and show how drawing and image making triangulates with linguistic communication and the person.

Exhibitions 2010 - 2017

Painting and Drawing

Void, God & Atom, 2019

Drawings from the Artist in Schools Programme 2018-2019

Infinity has No Centre, 2017

Last works painted in Spain and around small children. These works on canvas became sites of exploration for me and my girls then aged 3 and 6 years old.

Painted in Seville, Spain, these works explored along with my children, the diverted and buried rivers that run beneath our feet.

A Water Story, 2016

Tree, Ground, Play, 2015

Seville: Painting and drawing while managing day job and toddlers. Most of my time, I felt very close to the earth, in amongst the grass.

The Garden of the Moorish King, 2014

This is an inner city community garden where my girls and I spent a lot of time. A secret widl place with a special tree.

As early as 2010, text, image and spoken word were at play in my work. Here, an exploration of my grandparent's experiences during the Pacific War.

Look Up Kathie, 2010