Artist Statement

The themes I center my work around are multi-faceted and include conveying my experience as a AFAB trans-masculine person, the relationship to my body, my sometimes menstruating body, my orientation to death, composting and regenerating through transitions, my spiritual energy, my childhood and familial relationships, and I often use writing as a channel to process the themes of what I am articulating in my work. 

Painting, found object sculpture and writing is the primary focus of my art practices and connection is central to my orientation to the world. I am influenced by daydreams of bodies within bodies and worlds within worlds. I see magic in our forms ability to work with energies that are understood and unseen and the potential of our bodies to articulate that information beyond language. Generative energy is succulent in relationship to connection and creation through our material bodies seems infinite in that space.

Curiosity about the things we don’t talk about influences my work as well - the emotional complexities and impact of interpersonal relationships, what it means to struggle in a transactional and consumptive culture and the inherent beauty that exists despite reductive value systems. 

Within my practices I seek to find reprieve from the subtractive nature of performance and our world’s preoccupation with status, consumption and violence. I want my work to challenge me and to antagonize unconscious living. I am looking for a connection to something deeper, a universal truth to feel confronted or comforted by and I hope the viewer sees something recognizable in my work. 

-James Emmett