Emma Louise Pratt

Emma is known for her landscape based work where she explores specific landscapes that convey significance to her either for their historical or personal importance, serving as they always have, as a personal travel map.

Emma views herself as part of "the wandering folk." Descendant of migrants, and a migrant herself, she always finds herself in the position of the visitor, the outsider, the other. She explores in her work the multifaceted tensions and shifting borders of what identity is in a global present. This reflection is also informed by her training in museology and love of history, both geological and human. She is fascinated by her own children's identity as both children of a foreign mother and local father, living, as they presently do, where their ancestors have lived for thousands of years, a state of belonging that she admits to wishing for herself.

With this knowledge and quiet observation of everyday life around her, she interweaves her stories and stories of the land where she presently lives. Her children often collaborate in the making of the images she finally arrives at. Echoes of their drawing and mark making, either free of directed, can be seen in her work.

Emma is involved with the Visual Arts Circle, a group of language teaching practitioners with an interest in multi-modal literacy and explores the concept of being an artist educator.

Emma has exhibited through Whitespace in Auckland, New Zealand since 2005. She began exhibiting her work in TJFA in Palmerston North in 2001. Her 2005 work "The Stations of the Cross" can be found in Saint Andrews in the City, in her home town of Palmerston North, New Zealand.

Emma Louise Pratt studied at Ilam School of Fine Art, Canterbury University, New Zealand. She has been the runner up in the Molly Morpeth Canaday Award (2005), and a finalist in the Norsewear Award (2007) in New Zealand and finalist in the Focus Abengoa International Painting Prize, Spain (2014).
 

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Artist in Residence IATEFL, Brighton 2018 Introducing Emma Louise Pratt (Vimeo)

31 August, 2013
Read T.J McNamara's NZ Herald review
of Paintings online here.

Giving a First Hand Account
By Dr Warren Feeney. Read here.