Artwork by Emily Eeles

Emily Eeles

Emily uses the medium of drawing to isolate and capture elements of the world around her, particularly from nature. This intimate gesture elevates and immortalises the subject, allowing it to hold greater significance.  She seeks out subjects with visual complexity, aiming to replicate them with a certain stylised realism. This serves to celebrate the inherent beauty of organic form but offers a charm and romanticism lacking without artistic intervention.

Driven by the spontaneity of the process, much of Emily’s organic inspired works use decayed plant life for reference. There is beauty in this process’s ability to contort, wrinkle and shrink the forms it envelops. There is an innate tragedy to these cut flowers, they are sombre tokens of impermanence that can be remedied through the tender preservation of drawing.  Through re-representing a decayed and discarded bouquet, she hopes to grant it another moment of triumph.

Confronted by the intrinsic feminine connotations of the flower, Emily has begun to depict the female form as a means of exploring notions of femininity. Both series of drawings, floral and female, are driven by the contradiction of the supposed “ideal”.