EMMA NEUBERG

Painting in Motion: Colour, Animation and the V&A

My relationship with animation began long before I thought of it as digital practice.

In 1992, I spent time in Prague with the creative team around Czech filmmaker and animator Jan Švankmajer. Back in London during the 1990s, I made small animations by hand at the Film-makers’ Co-op in Primrose Hill, moving pieces of paper frame by frame.

Nearly twenty years later, those experiments resurfaced in a very different form at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

By then paper had become pixels. Photoshop and Illustrator had entered my studio and paintings that had previously existed as fixed arrangements of colour could move.

In January 2015, Alex Flowers of the V&A’s Digital Programmes team invited me to lead the first pilot session of the museum’s Samsung Digital Classroom. Writing about the workshop for the V&A, he illustrated the programme with three of my animated works…

Works in Continuance: Lincoln City Fellowship, Los Angeles 2020–2026

In 2020, I became a Lincoln City Fellow with the Speranza Foundation in the United States.

Six years later, I am still a Fellow.

I value the continuity enormously.

The Lincoln City Fellowship isn’t simply an award attached to a single completed project. It is a nationwide community of artists working across visual art, music, literature, theatre, photography, performance and film, supported through creative development, residencies, retreats, financial assistance and ongoing connection.

For an artist whose work develops slowly across years, that matters.

It has given me a framework in which something doesn’t have to be finished in order to have value.

I have started to think of some of my work as Works in Continuance…

Drapes: Memory of Colour at Craft Central UK

In 2019, Drapes was presented in Memory of Colour, my solo exhibition at Craft Central UK’s newly renovated Forge Gallery in East London, curated by Helen Kemp and directed by Marguerite Metz.

By this stage, the installation had already undergone several architectural transformations. At Craft Central, however, I felt that the work once again found a setting that allowed it to breathe. Rather than negotiating with corporate foyers, Drapes entered a space whose scale, atmosphere and industrial history became active participants in the exhibition.

The Forge occupied a beautifully restored Victorian shipbuilding yard where original brickwork, cast-iron columns, gantries and steel beams had been carefully preserved within the new gallery. A contemporary timber amphitheatre introduced another architectural rhythm, giving the space the atmosphere of a theatre suspended within an industrial monument…

Painting into Textiles & Back Again: An Arts Council England DYCP

In 2019, Arts Council England awarded me a Developing Your Creative Practice grant for a project titled Painting into Textiles & Back Again: Technique Exploration & Experimentation for Large-scale Installations.

Looking back, the full title describes an important point of consolidation within my practice. The significant words are not only painting and textiles, but into and back again. I was not proposing a departure from painting in favour of another discipline. I was interested in what might be discovered by allowing painting to move into another material language and, crucially, what that encounter might subsequently bring back to painting.

The award enabled me to investigate this movement more deliberately, building upon the large-scale installations I had recently developed through Drapes and Memory of Colour. It provided a period in which technique, material, scale and installation could be treated as forms of artistic research, extending questions that had already begun to emerge through the work…

Shield Paintings: Protection, Recognition and the Circular Canvas

The Shield Paintings began as a relatively small body of work, shown during Open Studios at Textiles Hub London. At the time, I presented them primarily as new paintings for visitors to encounter in the studio. Looking back, I see them as something more particular: a transitional group of works made after Drapes and before the large-scale investigations that developed through my Lincoln City Fellowship in Los Angeles.

They also marked a return to painting as a concentrated object.

After working with expanses of printed cloth that occupied architectural space, I wanted to make something visually immediate and contained. I chose circular canvases because the circle seemed capable of doing something that the conventional rectangle could not. It concentrated the image. There were no corners towards which the composition could dissipate. Pattern, gesture and colour were held within a continuous edge.

The paintings became objects with a strong physical presence: part painting, part sign and, increasingly in my mind, part shield…

Remembering Rudolf Nureyev: Quilt 23 at Tate Modern

In June 2025, my commemorative quilt for Rudolf Nureyev (Quilt 23), was exhibited in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern as part of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt.

I made the work to honour Rudolf Nureyev whose extraordinary contribution to dance transformed the cultural landscape and whose death from an AIDS-related illness remains emblematic of a generation of artists lost during the AIDS epidemic. The quilt forms part of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt, a remarkable collective artwork created between 1989 and 1996 by friends, partners and family members in remembrance of those who died from AIDS-related illnesses. I submitted my quilt to Rifat Ozbek’s Quilts of Love call-out in 1994 alongside Giorgio Armani, Bella Freud and Vivienne Westwood.

From 12–16 June 2025, visitors were be able to experience the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt in its entirety within Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Forty-two quilts and twenty-three individual panels were displayed together, recalling the quilt’s original public presentations, where it was shown outdoors in Hyde Park as both an act of remembrance and a powerful form of protest that challenged silence, stigma and political indifference during the AIDS crisis…

Drapes: Painting, Power and the Architecture of Cloth

Drapes was my first large-scale installation, commissioned by curator Hannah Rose for the Mirror Gallery at the University of Plymouth in 2016 to launch its Textiles Season, which also featured British designers Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons of Timorous Beasties and Kit Kemp.

Rather than hanging paintings on walls, I wanted the paintings to become the walls.

Measuring 3.5 × 4 × 5 metres (11.5 × 13 × 16 feet), Drapes consisted of twenty suspended textile elements. Using satin polyester as a volumetric medium, the installation transformed the gallery into an immersive environment in which colour, pattern and material occupied architectural space. Each element employed repeating…

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? Material Actions at CCANW

Following its presentation at the Mirror Gallery in Plymouth in 2010, Material Actions travelled to the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW) at Haldon Forest Park, near Exeter, where it was shown from 27 November 2010 to 27 February 2011.

For this iteration, I exhibited one work from the Billboard Skirts series: Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 2007, a polythene print on cotton measuring 140 × 100 cm.

I deliberately borrowed the title in its entirety from Richard Hamilton’s celebrated 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? I wanted the gravitas of that art-historical reference but I also wanted to draw a direct line between the burgeoning consumer culture Hamilton examined in the 1950s and its environmental consequences fifty years later…

The Quilt That Travels Without Me: Quilt 23 at Queer Britain

More than thirty years after I made my commemorative panel for Rudolf Nureyev, it has returned to a part of London connected to my early life as an artist.

In 2026, Quilt 23 of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt was selected for Body and Mind, one of the new displays at Queer Britain, the UK’s national LGBTQ+ museum at Granary Square, King’s Cross. The display explores queer experiences of health, illness and disability, including the profound impact of AIDS and the stigma surrounding it.

I went to see it there.

It looked beautiful.

And yet seeing it produced the same strange sensation I increasingly experience whenever the quilt reappears somewhere new. My name isn’t on the museum label. Nor are the names of the other makers whose hands created the seven panels…

Drapes at 99 Bishopsgate: Reconfiguring a Site-Specific Installation

Following the presentation of Drapes at the Mirror Gallery in Plymouth (UK), the installation was invited to open the Fine Art season in 2017 at 99 Bishopsgate in the City of London. The invitation came after Saff Williams, then at Acrylicize, encountered the press surrounding the original exhibition. The commission for Brookfield Properties marked an important new stage in the life of the work, bringing Drapes from a university gallery into one of London’s most striking contemporary architectural settings.

From the street, 99 Bishopsgate possesses a monumental presence; inside, its pristine geometry and luminous interiors reminded me of the cinematic spaces of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was an exhilarating context in which to present the work. Rather than occupying a conventional gallery, Drapes entered a space where art, architecture and public life intersected.

This version of the installation comprised eighteen suspended elements distributed throughout the building. Unlike the original presentation at the Mirror Gallery…

Barbie Goes Shopping: Material Actions and the Plastics Age

Barbie Goes Shopping is my favourite of the Billboard Skirts. Made in 2007 from discarded polythene and second-hand denim, it belongs to a series exploring consumer desire, identity and the increasingly complicated relationship between the materials we throw away and the images that persuade us to acquire more.

In 2010, Barbie Goes Shopping and Hey Superman were selected by curator Hannah Rose for Material Actions at the Mirror Gallery in Plymouth. The exhibition brought together thirteen artists and makers whose work explored the capacity of materials and making to contribute to ethical, social, cultural and environmental change.

The timing gave the Billboard Skirts a different resonance. I had made them in autumn 2007, at the height of the consumer boom and a year before the financial collapse of 2008. By the time they reappeared in Material Actions, the culture of apparently limitless consumption against which they had been made looked rather different…

Billboard Skirts: Plastic, Painting and the Pacific Gyres

Billboard Skirts, 2007, was the first body of work in which I began to think beyond the picture plane. Developed from my PhD research in Constructed Textiles at the Royal College of Art, the series explored how discarded materials might become the substance of painting itself.

The series comprised six works: Disney War Games, Barbie Goes Shopping, Hey Superman, Swissland, I Thought It Would Come True and Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Appealing? Each was constructed from recycled plastic bags and second-hand denim, using a printing process that grew directly from my doctoral research into extending the life of waste plastics through design.

The works were first exhibited in Ever & Again: Experimental Recycled Textiles, curated by Professor Rebecca Earley at the Triangle Gallery…

Cloud Buds: From Minton to Grayson Perry and The Democratic Dish

In 2018, I went to Chelsea Space to see The Democratic Dish: Mintons Secessionist Ware, an exhibition drawn from the collection of art historian and former Tate curator Simon Wilson and his wife Alessandra, alongside material from the Minton Archive.

I left wanting to make something.

The exhibition explored Mintons Secessionist Ware, produced in the early twentieth century and characterised by extraordinary combinations of stylised plant forms, sweeping outlines, colour and abstraction. Designed for industrial production and a wider market, these were objects in which some of the experimental visual language of European Art Nouveau entered everyday domestic life.

I was particularly drawn to their swirling compositions and the relationship between graphic outline and washes of colour. They reminded me simultaneously of painting, pattern and print.

That movement between categories felt familiar.

My relationship with Chelsea Space had already developed through The Geometrics, the project I co-curated with Daisy…

Drapes at Aldgate Tower: Scale, Suspension and Architectural Space

Following its presentation at 99 Bishopsgate, Drapes was invited to Aldgate Tower in the City of London. Commissioned by Brookfield Properties and curated by Saff Williams at Acrylicize, the installation entered a dramatically different architectural setting.

Where 99 Bishopsgate offered a sense of intimacy through its sequence of spaces, windows and planted courtyard, Aldgate Tower presented an expansive glass-and-steel thoroughfare crowned by an exceptionally high atrium. The architecture transformed the work once again.

CELEBRATING 10 YEARS AT THE V&A

Emma Neuberg celebrates ten years lecturing in Digital Pattern & Decoration in Art & Design at the V&A.

AIR IN LA

We’re thrilled to announce that after a productive time on the Artist Residency OTIS Summer Program 2019 in Los Angeles, Emma Neuberg has produced a new series of painting sculptures

AT THE V&A

Emma is excited to present her new Digital Pattern Art & Design workshops at the V&A for the upcoming season.

IN THE STUDIO

Emma enjoys nomadic studios in Europe and the US where she explores different painting cultures and landscapes.

AT MIRROR GALLERY

Mirror Gallery celebrates the first installation of Emma’s Drapes, measuring 11.5 x 13 x 16 feet (3.5m x 4m x 5m) as part of its textiles season celebrating artists who work with fabric.

IN THE GEOMETRICS

Emma Neuberg’s solo show at Mirror Gallery presents new works based on grid formations, modularizations and repeating patterns.

AT LONDON FESTIVAL OF ARCHITECTURE

Emma Neuberg will be in conversation with Neringa Dastoor for the London Festival of Architecture taking place at CASS ART this summer.

AT THE PODIUM

Emma gives her Shadow Fabric Artist Talk alongside her solo show programme at Plymouth College of Art & Design, in the UK.

AT FRIDAY LATES

Emma Neuberg is excited to present the next V&A Friday Late for the blockbuster exhibition The Fabric of India with The People’s Print!

AT THE V&A WITH SAMSUNG AUTODESK

Emma delivers an exciting design collaboration with Samsung and Autodesk at the V&A Museum in Kensington!

AT SOMERSET HOUSE

Emma is excited to present her new Digital Pattern & Decoration Art & Design workshops at Queen Elizabeth I’s former residence Somerset House!

AT KINGSGATE GALLERY

Emma shows in The Geometrics, the new London group show that she co-curated with Daisy McMullan at Kingsgate Gallery.

AT CHELSEA FUTURESPACE

Emma Neuberg shows in Surface at Chelsea FutureSpace, London, with Brian Chalkley, Edward Cotteril, Vanessa Hodgkinson, Charlotte Jonerheim, Sanghyun Kim, Kangwook Lee and Mohammad Namazi.

AT YOUNG MASTERS’ ART PRIZE

Emma Neuberg’s triptychs created during her Artist in Residency at Chelsea College of Art are exhibited at the Young Master’s Art Prize show in west London.

AT WIMBLEDON SPACE

Emma exhibits new animated paintings and wall pieces in Detours show next month at Wimbledon Space, London.

RUNNING POSTMODERNISM AT V&A

Emma Neuberg is excited to present new Pattern & Decoration Art & Design workshops with The People’s Print at the V&A in Kensington.

IN THE NEW V&A PLASTICS BOOK

The V&A launches a new book on plastics with a chapter dedicated to Emma Neuberg’s work.

AT THE INSTITUTE OF MATERIALS

Emma is happy to make the cover story for the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining Spring 2008 magazine!

AT CRAFTS COUNCIL UK

Emma Neuberg is in the new group show Eco Style curated by Rebecca Earley opening at the Crafts Council UK in north London.

AT THE ICA

Seminal works by members of the Textile Futures Research Group at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in March 2007.

AT CITY GALLERY

Emma Neuberg’s Blossom Capes are in the touring exhibition, Well-Fashioned – Eco Style in the UK, at the City Gallery Leceister, curated by Rebecca Earley. The show ran 15th July to 26th August 2006. Pictured is Blossom Cape, Emma Neuberg, watercolour and gold foil on rayon and PEVA, 40cm x 70cm, 2006. Photo by Emma Neuberg,…