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…

In the Studio at Otis: Painting, Dialogue and Los Angeles

In 2019, I spent a period as an Artist in Residence on the Summer Programs at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Supported in part through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice award, the residency gave me a studio in which to concentrate on a new group of paintings while entering a temporary community of artists, curators and educators working in and around the College.

A photograph of my studio from that summer shows paintings accumulating against the walls: works in progress, colour studies and larger compositions at different stages of resolution. I originally published the image simply as a glimpse into the studio. Looking at it now, I am more interested in what it records about the way I work.

My studios tend to contain several stages of a thought simultaneously. Finished and unfinished paintings coexist with earlier studies, fragments and…

The Geometrics: Making Process Public

In 2013, curator Daisy McMullan and I co-curated The Geometrics: Volume 1 at Kingsgate Gallery in London. The exhibition brought together artists and designers working through geometry, pattern, colour and material, including Camille Walala, Melanie Bowles, Ele Carpenter, Bridget Harvey, Tanvi Kant, Katherine May, Marie Molterer, Marie O’Connor and Clare Willard.

At the time, I was moving between several identities and contexts: artist, researcher, teacher, textile designer and founder of the Slow Textiles Group. I had spent many years within academic environments, but I was becoming increasingly interested in creating an independent space in which the experimental intelligence of textile practice could be encountered publicly.

The Geometrics emerged from that transition.

It was partly an exhibition, but I don’t think I ever…

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…

A Plastic Story: An Intimate Look at the Artist–Material Relationship

My relationship with plastic began long before I started thinking about it primarily as an environmental material.

As an undergraduate studying 3D Design at Brighton University, I specialised in Wood, Metal, Ceramics and Plastics. From 1991 onwards I became particularly interested in plastic and in what happened when a material associated with industry, mass production and inexpensive objects was treated with the attention normally afforded to more precious materials.

I wanted, in a sense, to luxuriate plastic.

I cast it, coloured it, layered it and experimented with its transparency, surface and capacity to hold an image. For my degree show in 1993 I made a group of six polyester-resin sculptures titled Angels. One subsequently entered the FKP Art Collection in Athens.

Plastic was already becoming more than a material I happened to use. It was becoming a way of…

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…

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…

Drawing with the Museum: Glass, Pattern and the V&A

One of my favourite workshops at the V&A took place in the Clore Gallery as part of Design the World, a programme inviting children and their carers to use the Museum’s collections as starting points for their own designs.

For this session, we began in the V&A’s Glass Gallery.

Rather than simply looking at the objects as historical artefacts, I encouraged participants to notice what glass does: how light passes through it, how forms distort, how reflections multiply and how colour and shadow alter according to the position of the viewer.

Back in the Clore Gallery, these observations became drawings made on Samsung tablets using Autodesk SketchBook. Lines could be repeated, reflected and reorganised into new digital patterns, allowing an encounter with an historical object to become the starting point for an entirely contemporary image.

Looking as making…

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.

Mini Skylons: Gender, Plastic and the British Council

Between 1998 and 2000, my work was selected for a British Council touring exhibition of recent Royal College of Art graduates, travelling internationally as a representation of emerging British art and design.

For me, the selection felt like a breakthrough.

But the work that achieved it had begun as an experiment in something rather more uncomfortable: what kinds of visual language were being recognised as serious contemporary design?

AT THE V&A

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

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 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 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.

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,…