TRACE PATTERNS SOLO EXHIBITION, 2017
Palmer Art Projects, Woollahra Sydney, February 8 to March 3, 2017

Emma Coulter’s solo body of work TRACE PATTERNS operates in an expanded field between painting, sculpture and spatial practice, continuing and expanding her rigorous investigations into the use of ‘colour as idea’ through formations which work beyond the use of paint as a material and begin to explore the ephemerality of both coloured light and reflection as mediums.

Borrowing processes from architectural thought, Coulter’s practice utilises acts of painting to transform, construct and alter environments, objects and surfaces. At the centre of her practice exists the use of colour as a language to define spatial outcomes. Simultaneously, negotiating between the formal and the kitsch and the concrete and the ephemeral. Her aim is to challenge boundaries and make connections between the high and the low, history and currency, and the intellectual and the ornamental.

In her work, colour is used as a ‘common’ agent to navigate between these opposing forces, where the central concern exists around space, and her preoccupation with its’ utilisation as a ‘medium’. Through her work the parameters of site, situation and spatiality are examined, delineated and repurposed to construct new realities, to question the distance between place, painting and the autonomous art object.

Photo credits: Emma Coulter
Artist portrait image Nikki To, Courtesy The Design Files