At the core of Emily Spooner’s artistic practice is intuitive creation, through which she gives form to the stories and symbols that emerge from both conscious and unconscious levels of understanding. She works primarily in painting, often adorning pieces with sculptural elements created through traditional jewelry-making techniques. Approaching painting as a form of storytelling, layers of image and texture build upon and interact with each other to shape the work’s narrative. Though many of these layers are obscured in the final composition, they are nonetheless essential to the totality of the painting. Spooner’s imagery is primarily sourced from amateur photographs, including her own family archive and discarded images from flea markets and digital repositories. She intuitively reworks and combines these sources through a process of transformation: images are translated into quick, tonal line drawings, selectively cut into stencils, and layered over each other to construct abstracted, interwoven compositions.
Emily Spooner is a visual artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University (2020) and has attended residencies across Canada and in Iceland. Her work has been selected for several group exhibitions in Montreal, including as part of the second edition of artch. Over the past year she developed a collaborative video practice with artist Jeff Mann, focused on puppetry, animation, and theatrics. She was recently invited to participate in the project Présences, which includes a forthcoming production residency and exhibition at Centre SAGAMIE (Alma, QC) and Vaste et Vague (Carleton-sur-Mer, QC).
