Premio Combat Prize

Courtauld Institute of Art
East Wing Biennial, Emilie Pugh, Anatomy of Thought , wall mural
Emilie Pugh is a young British artist who studied at Byam Shaw School of Art, graduating from The Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford University. Pugh has currently taken on a six-month residency at Aterlierhaus Mengerseile in Berlin. Having worked in a variety of media, Pugh has recently focused the main body of her work on drawing. She describes her process as an introspective journey- a mapping of an internal landscape, allowing for images and thoughts to unfold organically.
Often, without a clear conception of the final composition, Pugh uses the immediacy of the drawing process to embody her emotional and psychological presence. Her work is guided by her attraction to the delicate balance between temporal fleeting moments and the permanent, as well as an attraction to the transient nature of all things, inevitably meaning a preoccupation with the passing of time.
Her recent work, as can be seen in her mural at the Courtauld, employs alternative as well as traditional methods of mark making. Anatomy of Thought is built up through multiple layers of semi translucent Gampi paper, which have been both burnt into using an incense stick and drawn over with intricate lines using a minute paint brush and ink.
Pugh’s site specific piece evolved out of a desire to create something that could totally escape the constraints of the ‘edge’, whether the edges of a page or the frame around a canvas. Pugh wanted to make a work that was borderless, becoming part of the architecture of the space. The temporality of the site specific work, and indeed the INTERACT collection itself, heightens the fragility of the moment of engagement.
Emilie often describes her work as a ‘mindscape’ as it transports the viewer to a calm space of meditation. In doing so, the spectator engages in a dual meditative response. On the one hand, to come up close and lose themselves in the scrutiny of the minute details, and on the other, to step back and grasp the overall majestic, slow paced, circles of pregnant smoke. The audience is invited to move throughout the room and take in the gentle landscape of spreading pathways wrapping themselves around the corners and edges of the space.
For more information on Emilie and her work visit her website
- emiliepugh.co.uk