Emma Woolley
Birmingham
Artist Biography
I’m a Brummie, born and bred, and a contemporary figurative painter based at the Custard Factory in Digbeth.
I work primarily in oil paint and charcoal, using the human face as a way of exploring emotion, memory and our shifting sense of identity. Although my work begins with portraiture, I’m not only interested in capturing someone’s likeness. I’m more interested in what might be happening beneath the surface, and how a face can hold different, sometimes conflicting, emotional states at once.
Repetition, fragmentation and closely connected figures appear throughout my work. These allow me to explore the idea that identity is not fixed, but something that changes through experience, perception and our relationships with other people.
My recent work has become increasingly personal, including a return to self-portraiture as a way of understanding changes within my own emotional and psychological landscape. Birmingham remains an important part of both my life and my practice, so exhibiting close to my studio, as part of a celebration of artists from Birmingham and the Black Country, feels particularly meaningful.
About the artwork
Cheek to Cheek (Self-Portrait)
Cheek to Cheek (Self-Portrait) is an oil painting on unstretched canvas, measuring 90 × 120 cm. It forms part of my ongoing Inner States series.
The painting shows two versions of my own face pressed closely together. Both are me, but they do not feel like exactly the same version of me. It came from thinking about how we never remain completely fixed as people. Different parts of us come forward depending on how we feel, who we are with and what is happening in our lives.
I often find myself returning to self-portraiture after spending a long period painting other people. It is never something I consciously plan. It usually happens when something in me, or in the way I am making work, has begun to shift.
Painting my own face becomes a way of checking in with myself. It is less about whether my appearance has changed and more about whether the way I see myself has. For me, Cheek to Cheek holds two versions of the same person together, without asking either one to be the definitive version.