(c) Alice Dooreman
Emma Raymaekers is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in graphic design. In 2020, she graduated from KASK in Ghent (Visual Arts / Graphic Design). Since then, she has been working as a freelance graphic designer and developing her own independent practice.
Her work moves at the intersection of collage, drawing, and digital imaging and is rooted in collecting. Ever since childhood, Emma collects things that touch her visually or emotionally: stickers, comics, images, words. She works with what already exists and rearranges it into something new. When making things she often sets rules for herself to get a grip on the endless possibilities of a blank sheet of paper. Within these rules she finds room to use her intuition.
Her work has been showed at Kunsthal Gent, KOP (Antwerp), Parlor (Ghent), and Paramour (Brussels). She also created the artwork for artists such as Jennifur, Zwangere Guy and Lander Gyselinck, TJE, and Mosley Jr. At the moment shares a studio in Molenbeek with other artists and designers.
I would like to work on my series “I coloured it for you”. In this series I make drawings using oval and circular stencils and a protractor. When the outlined drawing is complete, I carefully color them in with coloured pencil. I like to see them as these children colouring pages that I make for myself. Sometimes I leave months in between drawing the lines and colouring them in. So that I can forget the drawing before I colour it in and almost forget that it was me who made the line-drawing.
Each drawing is constructed using a set of rules and steps I set for myself. I find it difficult to create something from nothing and these rules provide a structure where I can let my intuition flow. Because of the systematic and playful process, these drawings are a form of introspective order for me.
Though I’ve already created many pieces in this series over the past year, I feel like it’s just the beginning. The rules I set up for myself evolve as the series progresses, making the possibilities feel endless. Currently, the drawings feature simple shapes and symbols like stars and hearts, but what if I introduce more complex forms? Will the drawings retain their impact? Or, what if I focus more on the texture of the coloured pencils to shape the image itself? These questions, and many more, I would like to explore at the residency.