ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Emma Coulter, is a contemporary artist, whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture and site-specific installation.

Recent career highlights include the award of a major public art commission for Yarrila Arts and Museum in Coffs Harbour, as well as a new site-specific work for Shepparton Art Museum. Her work has also recently been acquired into the national collections of ANZ and Artbank, and locally by the City of Melbourne. 

Regularly a finalist in many of Australia’s national prizes, for both her painting and sculptural practices, Coulter has received a steady flow of awards for her work, since completing her Masters at VCA. These are inclusive of the Linden Art prize, the Footscray Art Prize, an Ian Potter cultural trust grant, a Creative Victoria grant, the Jim Marks postgraduate scholarship and a Fiona Myer Award. 

As an undergraduate at QUT, she also received multiple academic awards for her commitment to excellence. In recognition of her recent achievements, Coulter, was selected for QUT’s fourth Alumni Triennial, at QUT Art Museum, with a site-specific sculptural work being acquired into the Museum’s collection. Her inclusion in, ‘New Woman’, with a solo installation in the Dome Gallery, at the Museum of Brisbane, a centenary exhibition celebrating the work of ‘ground-breaking female artists’ , also recognises her as an important female artist working in the expanded field of painting and sculpture.

Contributing regularly to the public realm, significant public artworks include her colossal ‘spatial deconstruction’ artwork that wrapped over 100 metres of the Metro Tunnel’s building facade, in central Melbourne from 2021 to 2023, as well as her award-winning work on Footscray Community Art Centre’s facade. Other additions to the urban environment, include an enormous multi sided artwork in South Melbourne, a mural in Malvern East, a streetscape intervention on Richmond Town Hall’s facade, a light projection on the William Jolly Bridge, as well as a spatial deconstruction in Burnett Lane, Brisbane CBD.

Coulter's works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, at numerous institutional, commercial and artist-run spaces, (since her first solo exhibition in 2005), as well as in situ in the public domain. Highlights include exhibitions and installations in New York, and Germany.

Coulter was born in Northern Ireland during the heights of the troubles. She immigrated to Melbourne, Australia, with her parents, aged two, and relocated to Queensland with her family aged seven, where she grew up. In her late 20’s, Coulter returned to Melbourne to pursue her art career. She originally studied fine art at QUT in Brisbane, as a young school leaver, which she overlapped with a second degree, A Bachelor of Built Environment. Having worked in architecture for many, many years in parallel with her arts practice, in 2015, she completed a Master of Contemporary Art at VCA. That same year she had her first child, with a second child being born 18 months later. Through the ambition and scale of her work, Coulter advocates for the equal rights of women to work in public space.

Emma acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation, as the traditional owners of the land on which she practices, and working in the public realm she pays respect to Country, in acknowledgment of the continual Culture and stories of First Nations peoples, imbedded in the land, sky and sea that she practices on and under.