IN THE STUDIO – EMMA NEUBERG

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…

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…