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.
Works in Continuance
I have started to think of some of my work as Works in Continuance.
These are not necessarily works progressing towards a predetermined final state. They are ideas, images and material processes that remain active—sometimes for years—waiting for another scale, technology, material, building or encounter through which to develop.
The Lincoln City Fellowship has supported me in continuing a line of enquiry that became particularly visible in Drapes.
In that work, paintings and patterns moved away from the conventional picture plane and into printed cloth. The cloth was enlarged, repeated, suspended and eventually dispersed through architecture.
The question wasn’t simply how to make a larger painting.
It was what might happen when painting became environmental.
From Drapes to Walls
My ongoing project, with the working title Metabolizing, develops this further.
I am working towards large-scale, immersive pieces in which my hand-drawn images are digitally overlaid, repeated and manipulated before being printed across paper and potentially entire walls.
The techniques have evolved, but the movement between hand, screen, repeat and material is familiar.
drawing → digital transformation → repeat → surface → architecture
This is part of a methodology that has travelled through my practice for years.
At the V&A, I developed ways of moving from museum objects through observation and drawing into digitally transformed patterns.
At Chelsea Space, the process moved from Mintons Secessionist Ware to pastel drawing, Photoshop and finally ceramic transfer in Cloud Buds.
With Drapes, painting and digital pattern moved onto cloth and then into architectural space.
Now the Fellowship is helping me consider what happens when those images become larger still: repeated across paper and walls to create immersive environments in which the distinction between painting, pattern and architecture begins to dissolve.
What else can a painting become?
Here, perhaps, it becomes a room.
Hand and Screen
The digital processes are important to me because they don’t replace drawing.
They begin with it.
I make marks by hand and then use Adobe software to overlay, distort, multiply and reorganise them. Repetition allows a relatively intimate drawing to become something spatial and potentially monumental.
The computer introduces possibilities that I couldn’t anticipate in the original drawing, but traces of the hand remain.
That relationship between the handmade and the digital has interested me for a long time.
I don’t see them as opposites.
One gives the other somewhere to go.
Metabolizing
The working title Metabolizing describes something of this process.
To metabolise is to take something in and transform it.
That seems increasingly close to how I understand my practice.
Images are absorbed and transformed. Earlier works generate later ones. Experiences reappear in different forms. Drawings become patterns; patterns become surfaces; surfaces become environments.
Nothing necessarily disappears when the next work begins.
It changes state.
This is also why I am increasingly reluctant to think about my practice as a succession of discrete projects with neat beginnings and endings.
A work may be exhibited and then rolled up.
A drawing may remain dormant for years before finding another form.
A technique developed while teaching in a museum may reappear later in the studio.
An installation made for one architecture may contain the beginnings of another work intended for an entirely different space.
The work continues.
The Thwarted Voice
Metabolizing also continues an emotional and psychological enquiry running through my work around the thwarted voice: what happens when expression is suppressed, denied or prevented from being heard, and how those experiences might be transformed through making.
I am interested less in illustrating particular experiences than in what happens when their energy is translated.
Colour can become intense.
Pattern can repeat almost insistently.
Images can accumulate, collide and overwhelm their boundaries.
Scale can envelop the viewer.
In this sense, metabolising is both a visual process and a way of thinking about transformation.
Something difficult can enter a work without the artwork being reducible to the thing that produced it.
A Fellowship as an Artistic Ecology
One of the things I value most about the Lincoln City Fellowship is its community.
Independent artistic practice can be remarkably solitary. The Fellowship places that independence within a network of artists working across very different disciplines.
My fellow artists include filmmakers, photographers, musicians, writers, performers, choreographers and visual artists. Our work may look entirely different, but the Fellowship creates a continuing context in which unfinished ideas can be discussed and individual practices supported.
I have come to value this as another kind of artistic ecology.
Not every important encounter produces an artwork immediately.
A conversation may alter a decision.
Another artist’s process may make you reconsider your own.
Support may simply give an idea permission to remain unresolved for longer.
That space is important.
Continuing Rather Than Completing
Perhaps this is what the Fellowship has allowed me to understand most clearly.
Development doesn’t always mean replacing an earlier body of work with a new one.
Sometimes it means returning.
The Drapes are currently rolled and stored, but I don’t think of the ideas within them as finished. Their relationship between painting, pattern, scale, material and architecture continues to generate possibilities.
Metabolizing is one of those possibilities.
Paper instead of cloth.
Wall instead of suspended drape.
Repeat becoming environment.
An intimate hand-drawn mark becoming architectural scale.
The work changes, but something travels through it.
I used to think of this as development.
Increasingly, I think of it as continuance.
Fellowship
Lincoln City Fellowship
Speranza Foundation, USA
2020–2026
Emma Neuberg is a Lincoln City Fellow developing large-scale works exploring drawing, digital transformation, repetition, colour and architectural space.
Working title: Metabolizing
The Lincoln City Fellowship is a nationwide community of professional artists supported through residencies, retreats, creative development, financial assistance and ongoing connection.
Further information: Lincoln City Fellowship, Speranza Foundation