Knock Before You Enter

Concept

My name is Emma Hayes. I am a visual artist, primarily a painter, working in my studio in Dunboyne, Co Meath. My work is informed by my internalised experiences, childhood memories and immediate surroundings. I am influenced by the world around me. Merging experiences nostalgia and memories through the medium of paint. Through collage, paint and installation, I am interested in the process of making a picture of the everyday moments that are important to me.
The process of making a painting is a key focus in how I make work. How I apply paint is important to me. Painting with oil paint on canvas, I use gestural marks, confident brushstrokes, minimal strokes, layering and overlapping shapes, opacities, and translucencies to convey personal attachments to my environment and around home life. I carefully consider each mark before the paint brush touches the canvas, giving my paintings a determined lightness of touch. I am influenced by cherished memories, connections, relationships and looking back at the past and bringing it into the present. There is an evocation of the absence and presence of people in my life. I reflect on past and present relationships with people by associating objects with them. I like to make them present in my work without the figure been notably present. I am interested in the idea of how the home means different things to us all. We all have belongings that mean so much to us that may have been passed down through generations or perhaps just have a favourite cup that we like to drink our coffee out of in the morning. There are memories and associations we have within our homes and the community that we live in.
I have built up a library of motifs over the years where I have seen certain shapes and distinct features reoccur in my work. Reimagining and revisiting various sources that I have built up find their way into my works. In the studio I always work on several artworks simultaneously. From a source to a drawing to a collage to a painting to another painting, my works and sources influence each other. After I make a painting, it tends to lead me to another.