Artist Spotlight: Emma Jackson – Flourish 2025 Winner

We caught up with Flourish 2025, Printmaking in Excellence award winner Emma Jackson recently and asked her more about her work and practice.

Have a little read to see what she had to say:

Emma, Congratulations, on being selected for the Flourish 2025 Printmaking in Excellence Exhibition & Prize!  Can you tell us a bit about your winning piece? 

Thank you so much, and can I just say again a huge thank you to the entire WYPW team and especially the judging panel – It was such a shock – I’m on cloud 9! It’s such a great feeling when the work resonates with others.

Responding to the notion of childhood memory, my work in the exhibition combines painterly screenprint with assemblage techniques.

Each of my pieces in the exhibition is a key part of my current body of work which responds to the notion of childhood memory, and I’m thrilled to be exhibiting them together for the first time. Each piece combines painterly screenprint with assemblage techniques and incorporates a collection of children’s building blocks displayed in different ways.

Tell us about the work you submitted for Flourish 2025 and What inspired the piece(s)?

It all started with a quote in a book I was reading. I regularly explore themes of memory, loss and absence within my practice, and was inspired by the words of Penelope Lively in Moon Tiger:

   ‘We do not remember childhood — we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was.’

  

How did the idea or concept develop?

I often respond to personal archives and objects loaded with meaning – reminders of times gone by – the self now departed.

Working with a box of photographs from my own childhood, and questioning my understanding and even acceptance that this was me in the photos, I began recreating the images as large format painterly screenprints. I’m fascinated by the impact of playing with context and love to see what happens when it’s removed. On close inspection of my prints I began to notice miniature vistas appearing within the marks I was creating and started to isolate these elements.

I wanted to connect this work to the idea of ‘object’ of ‘souvenir’, and initially I was looking at creating collections of boxes, I’m a terrible hoarder, and have boxes and boxes of keepsakes not only from my own lifetime, but since the loss of my father in 2016, now also dating back a few generations. The idea of the box felt appropriate to notions of memory and the weight of accumulation of those memories we carry with us. This thinking led me on to thoughts of sealed boxes – the anticipation of what might be inside a box more enticing than the actual discovery – and somewhere along that thought process came the idea of using children’s building blocks. Many of the blocks I use date back to the 1940s or 50’s, and are symbolic not only of my father’s career in architecture, but also more broadly to touch on the human desire and encouragement from a very early age to build and create, to control and shape the world around us.

Very soon I had collections of ‘memory blocks’, each displaying an imaginary vista – a world within a world, each a treasure in its own right.

Through processes of creation, destruction, isolation, and reconstruction, I aim to reflect what we choose to remember, what fades away, and what is entirely imagined.

What techniques and materials did you use in your submission?

Each piece combines painterly screenprint on paper using acrylic inks, and assemblage techniques.

Why did you choose those particular methods?

I like to work with extremes – gestural and controlled, large format and miniature – and often find myself adopting processes that satisfy those extremes. A mixture of processes or stages of development also hold my interest and stop things feeling too repetitive and stale.

  

Were there any creative or technical challenges along the way?

At the size I tend to work at when screenprinting there are restrictions inherent in the process, but I like to lean into those. You don’t have long to get your image down before the inks start to dry on the screen, and I work back over my image several times in one session creating the finished prints in a single pull, all of which adds to the time pressures on the drying ink.

I also have no preconception of the look of the finished memory block piece when I start out on a screenprint. I’m focussed on the creation of my, often figurative, autobiographical, screenprint image, not miniature landscapes. This means I never know how much printed content I will need to create before I might start to find what I’m looking for. The first part of the process is very much down to chance. All part of the fun!

Realising my vision of displaying the blocks ‘suspended’ in space, inspired by the display of artifacts in museum display cases, has also proved challenging at times. However, I’m fortunate to work with a framer who understands what I’m trying to achieve and is willing to experiment.

Your work has a distinctive style, how would you describe it?

Controlled chaos!

Has your style changed or evolved over time?

It’s funny, I think my style is constantly evolving and can vary quite a lot, but many people have said they can identify my work quite easily. If anything I guess I’ve become a lot more confident in my mark making since working on the large format painterly screenprints and my visual language is becoming more defined through that mark making – I feel like I’m just beginning to discover my ‘style’.

Are there any artists or movements that influence you?

Subconsciously I gravitate towards the work of artists who I then discover echo my own areas of artistic interest: dramatisation of the everyday or the mundane, the theatrical space, the lived experience, the uncanny, truth vs fiction/the unreliable narrator.

I often find the artists that inspire me have a printmaking string to their bows.

The list is endless really – I’m continually discovering artists who inspire and influence my thinking and inspire me – but off the top of my head and in no particular order: Peter Doig, Frank Auerbach, Tracey Emin, Do Ho Suh, Jim Dine, The Brothers Quay, The Connor Brothers, Sarah Sze, Cornelia Parker, and so many more.

 What draws you to printmaking as a medium?

The processes in printmaking provide a level of tension I find vital to my practice – Creation of the work is a real dialogue between me and those processes, meaning I’m partially absolved of responsibility for the outcome. It keeps things interesting for me and takes the pressure off. It’s a nice balance.

My work often responds to themes of memory. The printed image evidences the printmaking process, in the way photographs or souvenirs serve to help us remember.  Details in my screenprints emerge and fade with each pull and each time the image is slightly different, like our memories.

  

What do you enjoy most about it?

I love to learn, and there are so many different ways to make prints, that I doubt I’ll ever run out of new avenues to explore. That feeling of it constantly being new takes some pressure off to make things perfect, and keeps me interested and hungry to learn more.

Are there any aspects you find particularly challenging?

‘The fear’ sets in if I’m attempting a new process for the first time, or going back to a process after a long time away from it. Even though I love to learn, I’m not a patient person, so some processes are better suited to me than others.

How do you stay inspired and motivated in your practice and How do you navigate creative blocks?

I tend to revert to research, learning and experimentation. I stop ‘trying’ to make and immerse myself in some wider reading, gallery visits, or learning a new technique or process – there’s always a printmaking technique I want to try or revisit. I also find a lot of inspiration in museums and through theatrical productions, so I tend to find myself back in these spaces when I want to free my mind and transport myself to another time and place.

What advice would you give to other or emerging printmakers?

Lean into the processes, let go, have fun, practice practice practice, and try not to be hard on yourself. Don’t be afraid to share your work – get it out there and get it seen, you’ll be amazed at how much feedback from others guides your practice and gives it direction and momentum. Most importantly make the most of your printmaking community – they are certainly some of the loveliest people I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet – ever willing to offer technical help, artistic feedback, or a shoulder.

Finally, how has being shortlisted for Flourish 2025 impacted your practice so far?

It’s still all sinking in, but the most immediate impact was the recognition from fellow printmakers – it’s already increased my visibility and more and more people are already familiar with my work. My fellow award winners and I have also discussed aligning some of our residency time at WYPW so some lovely connections there already too! The work will be touring for several months which is such an amazing opportunity – I’m thrilled my exhibited pieces will get to travel a little and encourage anyone who visits one of the exhibition venues to share their thoughts and feedback on the work – I’d love to hear what people think of the work. Feedback is so important – every single conversation I have about my work leads to new ideas and open up new directions. I’m so excited to start discussions around my solo show next year. Who knows what opportunities might arise from that.

 

As the Flourish 2025 Award winner, Emma will have the opportunity to present a solo print exhibition in Huddersfield next year. Additionally, she will benefit from a two-week period of access to the facilities at West Yorkshire Print Workshop and we look forward to welcoming Emma to her residency.

Flourish will be showcasing at the Huddersfield WYPW gallery until September 21st. It will then go on tour across various northern galleries.

You can find out more about Emma’s submissions for Flourish 2025 here.

For more information on all the shortlisted artists and work take a look at our dedicated Flourish 2025 page here.