Studio Visit with Emily Heath

Emily Heath’s artist studio, The Corner Store Gallery. Photograph by Madeline Young.

Studio Visit with Emily Heath

Emily Heath is one of our favourite emerging artists here at The Corner Store Gallery and is fast becoming one of Australia’s most popular still life painters. She’s also, I might add, a hilarious person with her humour showing through in each composition or title. We first discovered Emily’s work back in 2021 when she was a finalist in our Inside This Box group exhibition. After being invited to join our stable, Emily’s paintings became hard to hold onto as they quickly started walking out the door with their happy new owners.

Emily’s work is beautiful, unique, skilled and deeply personal. Her natural talent and eye for colour and composition are apparent in each and every work. The juxtaposition of traditionally depicted household items against more modern and unusual elements is at once humorous and intriguing. This body of work is an exploration of what it means to be a working artist and a mother and wife in the domestic environment.

I am absolutely thrilled to be hosting Emily’s first solo exhibition Ordinary Things this March. The catalogue can be viewed here with online sales launch at 8pm Tuesday February 28th. The exhibition is on display from March 1st to 11th 2023 with the Opening Reception taking place from 2-4pm Saturday March 4th, all welcome.

Exhibition Catalogue

Tell us a little about your background. How long have you been making art?

I have vivid memories of making flower crowns and fairy gardens with my sisters when I was very young, we played with clay (my step-father was a ceramicist) we painted maths at Steiner school... There was a lot of creativity in my early years. Unfortunately I stopped in my teens, I think a combination of teen angst and self-consciousness overwhelmed me and I didn’t get back into creating until my mid twenties. At that point I studied fashion design and worked as a textile designer for many years. Painting is a relatively new iteration of expressing my creativity but I love it so much, it’s such a thrill to start with a blank canvas and create something that didn’t exist before.

This is your first solo exhibition, what is the story behind this series? What is "Ordinary Things" about? What do these objects mean to you?

Since I started painting, maybe since I had kids actually, life has been one giant balancing act and I wanted to highlight and celebrate the way that women and mothers juggle their different roles. The commitment that it takes to smoosh everything else to the corner of my brain, to the corner of my house (I work from home) just to have the metaphorical and literal space to paint is enormous and speaks volumes for how much joy I get from painting. Ultimately though, my life, my children, my home are such a big part of my aesthetic and I wanted to paint objects that spoke to that fact, that described my surroundings and brought the viewer into my private world. Some of the objects also connect me to the past, and these toys that the boys no longer engage with are a good reminder that everything passes so quickly.

Can you talk us through your process? How do you choose a subject?

It’s always something different that sparks my interest or kicks off a painting, sometimes it’s a colour, sometimes an object, a bunch of flowers, a mood or an idea and I’ll build a composition around this initial spark. I prefer working from life, I feel as though I ‘see’ more when it’s from life, and I love the nuance of changing light and reflections from the surroundings, I even love the challenge of wilting flowers! Most of the work in this series have underpaintings in acrylic – it's an opportunity for me to work out my composition, colours (I mostly underpaint with the opposite colour to what I’ll finish with) and think about the theory of Notan. Once I start to overpaint in oils I slow down a lot and enjoy the texture and fluidity of the paint.

Can you describe your fabulous studio to our readers?

Fabulous might be overstating it a bit! I work in our kitchen; it has lovely light thanks to the multitude of windows that face east and north. I have a problem with buying too many indoor plants so there are plants everywhere, spilling off shelves and climbing the walls. There are a million objects that I use as subject matter everywhere, lots of them are from family members who have passed away, some were gifts, some I found or bought. In addition to all this chaos there are also lots of bits and pieces that belong to the boys. They have a separate art corner which is always a total shambles, their books and toys are sitting next to watercolour paints, brushes, pens to write on the windows (these are a bad idea, don’t buy these) and always, ALWAYS six million pieces of Lego (I swear they multiply overnight). So yeah, it’s a busy but beautiful space!

What's next for Emily Heath?

Well, my next big adventure is going to the National Art School to do my BFA! I’m pretty pumped to get stuck into the different subjects such as sculpture and ceramics and of course to learn new painting skills.