Tenderly Yesterday
6 Sept 2024
28 Sept 2024
Emma Velde-Schaffer
Petals akin to engrams, memory traces, feature in works by artist Emma Velde-Schaffer in a painterly response to Margaret Stoddart’s rose watercolours. Concepts of memory, persistence and decay resonate with paintings that have taken a thematic cue from roses, which are transformed into something far less fragile and passive. The paint is tapestry-like in its storytelling, with forms and shapes are threaded under and over, hidden and exposed in equal measure. A carnal, bloom and decay takes place on the canvas, reflecting the artist’s infatuation with the process of senescence in a cut flower, where cells deteriorate and lose function over time. Gold pigment and interference paint seduce like an opulent drawing room, and with titles that read uncannily like a love song, this small series pays a sweet homage to Margaret Stoddart.
Emma Velde-Schaffer is a New Brighton-based artist, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from University of Canterbury, and Master of Design from the University of Technology, Sydney. Her inspiration is bound by two primary parameters: the circle and the surface, both at the end from a very long transition from the landscape. In Velde’s work, affinities can be detected with the poetic colour fields of Gretchen Albrecht, and the elaborately textured surfaces of Louise Fong. Her painterly surfaces with their delicate and lush layering of colour and texture evoke undersea environments, galactic nebulae, but most importantly a kind of meditative emotional inscape. This effortless complexity is reflected in the diversity of the media: ink, paint, water and gesso - each has its own liquid behaviours, densities and viscosities.
