Thin air, oil on linen, 25x20cm, Pouquoi London, 4 Princelet Street London, 2024
Emma Tod studied Painting at Falmouth School of Art before gaining her MFA in Fine Art Media at the Slade. She was selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries and has been a member of a number of artists run organisations including Gasworks, Lux Critical Forum and The Lost Soul And Stranger Service Station. She has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad including the ICA and the Royal Academy and has attended residencies in Budapest and Cape Town. Emma is a Lecturer in Fine Art and Contextual Practice at Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London. Recently she has been shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize and the Contemporary British Painting Prize where she received the Blyth Arts Award.
"Tod’s work explores the remediation of paint in a period of digital image circulation, with its accelerating speeds of transmission and shared attention deficit. Works negotiate this shift through stillness and ambiguity. Peripheral events, fleeting moments, and chance encounters are brought to the centre creating new imaginary territories. Visual fragments taken from the internet, TV, and art history are playfully recombined and erased. Zones of exclusion are brought to the fore, challenging the primacy of
centre over periphery. Exclusion matters.
Layers of transparent glaze are built to create a shallow depth of field that replicates the luminosity of the screen. Here, figurative and non-figurative elements meet, collide, and are altered by each other. Fluctuating areas of colour and bodies of paint are expanded and foregrounded. Ambiguity invites us to speculate, to create meaning playfully, offering a counterpoint to the directed and surveilled nature of our digital lives.
Night walks are an important part of Tod’s practice. Not only challenging what can be seen, but who should be seen, where, for what reason?. Walking at night can be away of disappearing, and of simultaneously becoming hyper-visible. Night walking can be to challenge to paternalist orthodoxy. So too can painting.
Lee Mackinnon 2023
Selected exhibitions:
Forthcoming:
Come Closer, Blyth Gallery, Imperial College London, June 2025
2024
Echoes, Curated by Wonzimer (Los Angeles) for OHSH Projects, London
Works On Paper, Zepster Gallery, Brooklyn
Silent Disco, curated by Grahame Crowley
Pouquoi London, Curated by Gertrude and Canopy Collections, London,
Great Expectations, General Assembly, London
All This Wrath, Blue Shop, London
British Art Fair, GBS Fine Art
London Art GBS Fine Art
Eye Of The Collector, GBS Fine Art
2023
"Frequency" curated by Imogen Wetherell for OHSH Projects
www.ohshprojects.com/frequency
John Moores Painting Prize 2023 Walker Art Gallery
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/jmpp/john-moores-painting-prize
Contemporary British Painting Prize 2023
Huddersfield Art Gallery and Thames Side Studios, London
Solo show IMT Gallery London
Light the lamp rarely, let the shadow come
imagemusictext.com/
2022
Beep Painting Biennial, Elysium Gallery, Swansea
Books curated by Cultivate, London
https://cultivategallery.com/
2021
Vertical Merger Curated by Uncovered Collective, London
This year's Model Studio 1.1 London
Saturation curated by Cultivate, London.
https://cultivategallery.com/
Post Analogue Labyrinth IV, virtual exhibition
2019
P.A.L Deptford X, London
2018
Osman’s Xmas Bazaar, Studio1.1, London
Post Analogue Labyrinth, Deptford X, London
2017
The Lost Soul and Stranger Service Station, Deptford X, London
Deep Space studio1.1, London
2016
Civivlsed? Hoxton 402, London
Looking up, studio 1.1, 2016
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London
On Landscape #3, Lower Hewood Farm, Dorset
Float, Southampton Solent University
2015
I’MTEN, IMT Gallery, London September
backs to the future, Lux Critical Forum 2014/15 @ Five Years, London
Red Show, Studio 1.1, London
On Landscape, Yinka Shonibare Guest Projects, London
2013
Playback, Peacock Yard, London, July
2012
Ideas In Motion, Milton Gallery, St Paul’s School, London
2011
Bloomberg New Contemporary Archive Films, ICA, London
Chainletter, www.chainletter.mini-haha.com, 2011
2010
I Want To Believe, Millais Gallery, Southampton
2008
Life Is A Gas, Beverley Knowles, London
2004
International Exchange, Times Square Gallery, Hunter College, New York
Tempered Ground, Museum Of Garden History / Danielle Arnaud, London
Weeds, Hiscox Arts Projects, London
The Moon Will Save Our Ass, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
2003
One take,Film Festival Zagreb, Croatia
New Contemporaries, Cornerhouse Manchester and 14 Wharf Road, London
Island Film and Video Festival, Prenelle Gallery, London
2001
East of Eden, Spacex Gallery, Exeter
Millennium Minutes, Touring Show, Great Britain
1999
Porthcurno Beach Super 8 film Camera work for Tacita Dean, Newlyn Gallery Penzance
Close To Home. UFF Gallery, Budapest