Emma Stone-Johnson

What would it be like to walk through a museum of melted paintings? Their colours seeping over the floor. Juice dripping and split. The marks; slurred punctuation. The residue forms gullies and small pools/worlds. The floor would be an ocean, a world lung. How obscene. What an adventure. (Words Inspired by the poet Anne Carson.)

As a child I drew cats, mostly mine; green eyes, pink paw pads, grey fur - a grey so complex, a colour that contained all colours.

I’m colour coding; an archaeological forensic investigation into my own psyche.

My studio practice is chancy, it includes an investigation into pigments, what is colour, constructing new brushes and writing. The brushes I make look like my childhood birthday cakes. I like a mark to appear as if out of nowhere like on an old blurry 90s TV screen. I like to work on a large scale, I want them to be larger than me. They are oversized letters, they are billboards, they are satellites. Hunting.

Paintings are vessels for the artists’ inner worlds, the canvas a flickering light display. Painting is a living breathing thing, it makes me feel connected to something greater. Creating transcends the banal and the boredom. A ritual, a dance. I’m not interested in painting anything too representational; because when form is missing all that is left is the sensation of presence and the colour and texture of memory.