We close the week's A Portfolio department with the paintings and drawings of UK-based Emma Cousin. The painter will have an upcoming show at Jessica Silverman Gallery and showed new works at Niru Ratman in London earlier this year.
Emma Cousin was born in Yorkshire in 1986. She gained her BA from The Ruskin School of Art in 2004-2007. Cousin is a draw-er and a painter working in Peckham, London. Cousin’s figurative paintings feature dynamic, carnivalesque scenarios that explore the space between realism and fantasy, felt experience and communication. Interested in exploring the normative tensions within contemporary society, her contrapuntal compositions, colourful bodily extensions and awkwardly precise drawing acts out alternatives, led by a formal and diagrammatic logic. Responding to the limitations of language, Cousin considers how we might interact without it, in pre- or post-linguistic states. Painting ideas of support, mobility and progress, she often initially responds to words, in drawings that highlight puns and linguistic playfulness whilst breaking down meaning. Using metaphor as a visual vehicle she demonstrates the breach between the figurative meaning and the literal application.
