In her new solo show blood, fish and bone Emma Cousin develops a painterly language that moves between body, landscape and system. The works unfold through a dense network of references; mapping, memory, weather, geology and anatomy, that are folded together into images that resist stable orientation. Space is not fixed but continually collapsing and reforming, as interior and exterior states become difficult to separate.
Cousin’s practice has long been rooted in language as a generative device. Wordplay, idiom and metaphor act as starting points, producing visual structures that stretch, invert and reconfigure meaning. Earlier works often centered on the figure as a site where these linguistic slippages could be staged. In these recent paintings, that logic expands into a more dispersed and immersive field. Bodies dissolve into tanks, weather systems and subterranean environments; the figure is no longer singular or contained, but distributed across the surface.
Drawing remains central to this process. Working with charcoal alongside paint, Cousin uses mark-making as a way of thinking, an exploratory, physical activity that allows forms to emerge, break down and reassemble. Lines are smudged, erased and redrawn; negative space oscillates between void and structure. This continuous reworking produces surfaces that are at once diagrammatic and unstable, holding multiple systems of knowledge in tension.
Colour operates as both sensation and signal, moving between the physiological and the symbolic. Hues suggest internal states such as heat, pressure and digestion, as well as external conditions such as weather or terrain. Across the paintings, these elements accumulate into what might be understood as pressurised systems; environments in which forces act upon one another, displacing, compressing and transforming form.
The resulting works function as sites of simultaneous experience, where memory, observation and invention coexist. Rather than resolving these elements into a fixed image, Cousin allows them to remain in flux, testing how much a painting can hold and how a body, in turn, might be mapped, dispersed and re-formed within it.
Emma Cousin (b. Yorkshire, UK, 1986) is a painter and drawer based in London. She received her BA from Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Fine Art. She has had numerous solo exhibitions in London; including Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, as well as group exhibitions throughout Europe and in China.
Cousin has received the Hogchester Arts residency (2024), Survey Award (2019), and Skowhegan School of Painting residency (2018), among others. Her work is included in collections that include the Arts Council Collection, London; Xiao Museum, China; Zuzeum Museum, Riga, Latvia; Aishti Foundation, Lebanon; W Art Foundation, Hong Kong; and KD Collection, Hong Kong.
