Like many artists, Emma Coulter says it took her a while to find her voice. After she graduated high school in Brisbane, she studied a Bachelor of Visual Arts and a Bachelor of Built Environment — which she describes as being creative, like architecture, but technical, like engineering.
She was always practicing and exhibiting painting on the side as a passion project. But it wasn’t until she moved to Melbourne and decided to study a masters degree at the Victorian College of the Arts (almost 15 years after her undergraduate!) that it all started to come together.
‘I recently told a friend that studying there was like a holiday for me,’ Emma says. ‘Because working full-time on my practice was a gift, and something that I had never really had the opportunity to do before in that critical, yet supported, environment.’
This is when she started the first of her ongoing ‘spatial deconstruction’ works, using bold, bright and neon colours to create sprawling geometric sequences and patterns. Sometimes these are on canvases, sculptures, or large-scale public art commissions that you might have seen across the city — including a mural for Metro Tunnel that wrapped the buildings along Swanston Street and Flinders Lane, spanning more than 100 metres long!
She divides her time between making ‘site-specific paintings’ from her studio in the Macedon Ranges and her larger public art projects, in addition to ‘project managing’ her household and two children. But whether the art pieces are big or small, they always catch your eye.
‘Colour is definitely the central idea in my work that connects my almost 20 years of practice,’ she adds.
‘I work with a limited colour spectrum of up to nine colours, this enables me the freedom to work across mediums. With the colours being set, it allows me to experiment with bigger ideas across my whole practice.’
Her new exhibition, ‘Infinite Systems’, is an overview of her practice so far, revealing metal sculptures she’s been working on since 2020 and a new site-specific ‘spatial deconstruction’ work. It’s a showcase of what Emma does best: creating intriguing worlds of colour.
See ‘Infinite Systems’ at James Makin Gallery from June 15-July 2.
