04 Mar 2019

International Womens Day: Ikona

Artist Samantha Louise Emery has created a series of ten portraits celebrating the women who have inspired her throughout her life. The exhibition is available to view in The MediaWorks from 4th-11th March 2019, in celebration of International Womens Day.

As a body of work, IKONA | Mirrored Interior, each multimedia piece is symbolic of human awareness and all are deeply spiritual. They all depict their female subjects in bright abstract forms with their features becoming distinguishable upon closer inspection. The artistic gestation for all the pieces took precisely nine months.

Each work mixes four mediums, digital drawing, photo compositing, embroidery and painting. The portraits are digitally printed and then hand embroidered with silver, copper and golden thread, acrylic paint is then applied before the canvas is stretched with stainless steal cable wire onto custom made frames. This process is completed very instinctively with each medium adding another layer and dimension to the work of art. The stretched material is reminiscent of skin, the IKONA skin. Here the artistic process becomes a ritual where the artist attempts to get inside the skin of her subjects.