This new body of work brings together different strands of Emily Moore’s practice, drawing on visual languages that have emerged at different points throughout her work. Mountainous landscapes are brought into conversation with architecture, fencing and geometric structures, alongside photographic fragments, graphic forms and increasingly gestural passages of paint.
Photography remains an important starting point, but the relationship between source image and finished painting has become less direct. A return to screenprinting has allowed Moore to reintroduce architectural imagery while exploring new ways of translating and fragmenting her photographs. As the works develop through successive layers of print, paint and drawing, familiar imagery shifts between representation and abstraction. A fence might become a repeated pattern, architectural details dissolve into geometric forms, while fragments of landscape can function as much as texture or mark as recognisable subject.
This movement between recognition and abstraction runs throughout the exhibition. Rather than occupying fixed roles, figurative and abstract elements overlap, interrupt and obscure one another, allowing images to emerge and recede across the painted surface. The precision of screenprinted and geometric forms is offset by a more physical and gestural approach to painting and drawing.
While an element of control remains integral to Moore’s process, this body of work has involved deliberately loosening some of the structures that have previously shaped her paintings. Working across unstretched canvas and panel, she has allowed greater space for experimentation and for individual works to evolve through the process of making. An expanded palette introduces warmer reds and oranges alongside the blues that have long characterised her work, adding another element of unfamiliarity to an established visual language.
Made in anticipation of a forthcoming residency in Portugal, the works reflect a conscious desire to push beyond familiar ways of working. Rather than marking a departure, the exhibition sees previously distinct aspects of Moore’s practice converge, creating new relationships between landscape and architecture, representation and abstraction, precision and gesture, and ultimately, control and uncertainty.
