During a printmaking course in Milan in 1993, Emma Davies had a lightbulb moment. Looking down at her ink-stained hands, the realisation that she loved working with them, found inspiration in their profound capacity to create, dawned, marking the inception of an artistic immersion that has since flourished. On returning to Melbourne, she established a studio and began experimenting with shape, form and texture, manipulating mediums like resin and fibreglass to cultivate intuitive outcomes forged from a reconciliation between play and inquiry.
For the next decade, Emma worked on multiple commissions in the private and public sectors, her work being particularly aligned with architectural collaborations where she created feature walls, lighting and screens that held objects within their fibreglass embrace.
Never one to do things on a traditional path, Emma soon began working with polypropylene packaging, devising ways to resurrect an overtly man-made material into one that assumes the qualities of the natural world. Weaving within the netted voids, stretching it over forms and then innovating further to give structure, Emma meticulously forged the material into something that resembled an architectural skin.
Today, Emma’s work has evolved through a practice that fuses inspiration from nature and the bounty of artisanal techniques she observes through travel, collaboration and innovation. Always remaining dedicated to play and an inherent joy in the discoveries that spring from it, her pieces have progressed into labour-intensive wall hangings constructed from melted baler twine pressed into netting. When arranged en masse, the pieces take on the essence of a technical fabric adorning walls in elegant swaths or assuming silhouettes that mimic nature’s striking formations.