(Artist Statement)
I keep circling the same question: what can painting actually do? Not in a lofty theoretical sense, but in the messy, physical way that paint insists on being both material and thought. My work grows out of that tension — the way strict geometry can brush up against something loose, impulsive, almost bodily. I’m always toggling between control and release, order and chaos. It’s like trying to compose an argument between structure and feeling.
The blank surface is never really blank. It hums with possibility — it’s the stage, the dare, the point of resistance. I start there and let the painting decide how far it wants to go before falling apart. The surface holds everything: absence, presence, a sense of time spent with the material until it starts to talk back.
Colour is my way in. It’s emotional, intellectual, hormonal. Sometimes it behaves; mostly it doesn’t. I think of colour as a kind of language that can slip and stutter its way toward meaning, or dissolve meaning altogether. For me, painting is also about queerness — not as a subject, but as a logic, a way of staying open, fluid, contradictory. I want the work to move between clarity and confusion, to hold multiple states at once.
The paintings live in that uneasy, joyful space where systems fail and improvisation takes over. They might look confident, but they’re always on the edge of undoing themselves. That’s the part that keeps me hooked — the constant negotiation between precision and mess, elegance and absurdity, hope and doubt. In the end, I think of each painting as a kind of thinking-out-loud — a visual record of uncertainty that somehow holds together, at least for a moment.
(Biography)
Emma Beer (b. 1987, Echuca, Victoria) lives and works on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country (Kamberri/Canberra, ACT). She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Painting) with First Class Honours at the Australian National University School of Art in 2009.
Beer has developed a robust solo and group exhibition record. Notable solo exhibitions include Zooper Dooper at the Drill Hall Gallery, ANU (2022) and Rainbow. Paddle. Pop. at Gallery 9, Sydney (2024).
Her awards and nominations showcase critical recognition across Australia: in 2022 she was winner of the Goulburn Art Award at Goulburn Regional Gallery. She was a finalist in 2021 for the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize at Bendigo Art Gallery. In 2024 she was shortlisted for the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize.
Her work is held in significant public and institutional collections, among them: Art Bank, Sydney; Goulburn Regional Gallery, NSW; Macquarie Group Collection, Sydney; Canberra Museum and Gallery, ACT; and the Drill Hall Gallery, ANU.