Emily southwick
Duality (2020) questions the physicality of fear and its intimate connection with the human body. The project explores the coexistence between our living fears—such as spiders, sharks, and snakes—and the human form, bringing to light the abject nature of what we instinctively reject. Through this encounter, Duality proposes an inversion: instead of distancing ourselves from fear, the work invites acceptance, suggesting a merging of the fearful and the human. The use of black ink becomes a crucial material and metaphor. Its fluid, unpredictable nature reflects the fragile and uncontrollable essence of fear, while its deep intensity embodies both attraction and unease. The ink’s darkness captures the dual qualities of beauty and terror, allowing the work to hover between fascination and discomfort. Through this tension, Duality encourages reflection on the boundaries between body and fear, darkness and form—inviting the viewer to confront, rather than escape, the intimate presence of what unsettles us.
Duality 2020
Layers (2020) explores the boundaries between imagination and reality, focusing on fictophilia, fictosexuality, and fictoromance—emotional or romantic attachments to fictional characters. The project examines how these connections can influence mental health and wellbeing, particularly when they evolve into obsession. Through mixed media and collage, the work constructs figures that appear partly human and partly imagined, using visual layering to express the desire to merge with fiction and inhabit its worlds. The result is a psychological and emotional exploration of fantasy, identity, and longing, revealing how imagination can both enrich and distort our sense of self.
Layers 2020
welcome home 2021
Similar to my project Timelessness, Welcome Home reflects on the emotional impact of the Covid-19 lockdown, shifting focus from the outside world to the interior of the home. The project comprises two sculptural interventions: the first, a black box inspired by Ernesto Neto’s Sopro exhibition, features a glue gun sculpture atop and a peephole revealing another sculpture illuminated by a flickering orange light. The second, influenced by Rebecca Horn’s Spiriti di Madreperla, incorporates LED light strips within a metal cage to symbolise life contained within confinement. Together, these works evoke the tension between safety and restriction—the feeling of being trapped within one’s own walls. Through the interplay of light and form, the pieces create a mood that is both saddened and serene, capturing how spaces once associated with comfort came to feel unfamiliar and confining during lockdown.
Inspired by post-digital art practices and the work of artist Oli Epp, this project examines the rapidly evolving relationship between humans and technology. It reflects on how digital culture continues to shape our notions of personal status, identity, and self-worth through a social lens. By creating comical, cartoon-like characters, the work adopts an innocent, playful aesthetic that contrasts sharply with the underlying critique of technological influence. This visual lightness serves as a counterpoint to the often darker reality of our digital existence—where technology, although harmless and helpful, can become dangerous when left unchecked. Through this juxtaposition of humour and caution, the project invites viewers to question their own engagement with technology and the subtle ways it mediates our everyday lives.
Post digital pop 2020
Timelessness explores the suspended sense of reality experienced during the Covid-19 lockdown, reflecting on the loss of connection to the natural world and the altered perception of time that came with isolation. The project began as a visual response to the outside world we could no longer reach—a world that continued to grow, change, and decay without us. Through drawings, paintings, and digital experiments, I depicted plants drained of colour, rendered entirely in black as though rotting. This choice symbolises the absence of life and vitality that many felt while confined indoors, as well as the psychological distance created between humans and nature. As the project developed, these pieces evolved into a large mixed media work that layered prints with the recorded dates of each lockdown, turning personal and collective memory into a visual timeline. The repetition of form and texture mirrors the monotony of isolation, while the darkened organic imagery contrasts the idea of natural renewal with the stagnation of time. The use of both digital and traditional methods reflects the fractured reality of the period—one in which screens became our main window to the world beyond our walls. Ultimately, Timelessness serves as a meditation on loss, resilience, and the fragile balance between humanity and the natural environment. It captures the haunting stillness of a period when time seemed to dissolve, and the world outside became both distant and painfully alive in our imaginations.
timelessness 2020
stranger 2021
Stranger is a photographic exploration of isolation, ambiguity, and the haunting beauty of the unknown. Captured at night through fog and low light, the images dissolve the boundaries between clarity and obscurity, turning familiar spaces into unfamiliar, almost cinematic environments. The fog acts as both a physical and emotional veil—softening reality while heightening a sense of detachment and quiet unease. The series reflects on the feeling of estrangement that lingers in the aftermath of social distance and solitude. Each photograph invites the viewer to question what is seen and what is imagined, blurring the line between presence and absence. The subdued light, empty streets, and hazy textures create a dreamlike tension where the viewer becomes both observer and intruder—an outsider moving through a world that feels distant yet intimately known. Through its visual ambiguity, Stranger captures the quiet loneliness of night and the eerie beauty of disconnection, suggesting that sometimes what feels unfamiliar can reveal deeper truths about ourselves and the spaces we inhabit.
Inspired by Hattie Stewart’s playful and subversive approach to reimagining fashion imagery, Alter Ego (2020) explores the faults and hidden sides of our constructed personas. The project investigates how we present ourselves versus how we truly are beneath the surface. Using fashion magazine cutouts as a base, each painted collage exaggerates and distorts beauty, revealing grotesque or surreal alter egos that challenge ideas of perfection and self-image. Through bold, illustrative interventions — reminiscent of Stewart’s “doodle-bombing” technique — the work exposes the monsters we conceal within, suggesting that what appears polished or desirable on the outside may hide something unsettling underneath.
Alter ego 2020
Camouflage and misdirection 2021
Testing the borders of perception and interpretation, this digital drawing invites viewers to look closely—to imagine, to search, and to uncover a hidden secret. The project began with the idea of childlike imagination; as children, many of us saw shapes and figures in clouds, textured walls, or curtains in the dark. Drawing from my own experiences, I wanted to test this imaginative instinct in adults. While many viewers initially saw nothing, the image secretly originated from painted lines on my own face, later digitally reworked into abstraction. I can no longer unsee the face, knowing its origin—but can you see it, and if you do, can you unsee it?
Lost and Found began with a single broken high heel—its pair missing, its function gone. This object became a metaphor for feeling out of place and displaced in the world; what once had purpose no longer fit its original role. The project explores transformation and rebirth, suggesting that what is lost can be rediscovered in new forms and meanings. The heel was reimagined and adorned with origami flowers—objects that themselves embody change. Once flat sheets of paper, the folded flowers have undergone their own metamorphosis, losing their former identity to become something entirely new. Through this act of reconstruction, Lost and Found celebrates the potential for renewal within loss, illustrating how beauty and meaning can emerge from what is broken or forgotten.