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Emily Fong

Discover Emily's collaboration with LifeSpace and WCAIR here.

Emily is an artist exploring life and death, embodiment and emotion; the experience of existing in a human container. Her artistic practice is underpinned by the observation and communication of the life cycles of living things; growth, mortality and change from the micro to the macro. Through the mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture and writing, she seeks to highlight our similarities not only to one another but also to other species that occupy this planet. What are we made of? How are we structurally and emotionally connected beneath the skin? Her intuition is that, by going deep inside life, turning it inside out, she might discover new ways of observing and re-configuring the outside.

Emily studied Fine Art at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia and the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, Scotland. She has a BA in Architecture from The Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane and l'École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Grenoble, France.

Since early 2019 she has working as Artist-in-Residence at The Centre for Regenerative Medicine, Edinburgh BioQuarter, exploring art-science collaboration as a model for public engagement, training to observe the world at a microscopic scale and developing methods of using her practice to amplify the beauty and significance of the tiniest encounter.

Currently she is engaging with researchers at the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research (WCAIR) in collaboration with LifeSpace Dundee and DJCAD (University of Dundee) to explore what life is like for scientists living and working through this extra-ordinary time of Covid-19. Like any great adventure, who knows where the conversation will lead us?!

Alongside teaching Architectural Visualisation at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane between 2011-14, she co-founded the creative learning project Urban Art Binge (UAB) and brought it to Scotland, featuring at the Architecture Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. She facilitates life drawing sessions in Fife and has tutored life drawing classes for the University of Dundee’s Access to Creative Education Program (ACES). Recently Emily hosted the Laboratory Art Binge (LAB) at CRM with the Luminate Festival and art-science workshops with ASCUS Lab funded by the British Heart Foundation.

Emily was selected as one of nine international artists to participate in the residency PLACE, PEOPLE and TIME: Publishing as an Artistic Practice 2019, facilitated by The Museum of Loss and Renewal (TMoLaR) in partnership with My Bookcase in Collemacchia, Italy, exploring the book as a platform for encounter. The group is currently working on a collective publication to be published by The Museum of Loss and Renewal. This was a return for Emily, having previously been selected as a resident in 2018. Other recent projects have included New Emergences The Exquisite Corpse: Recomposing The Body; a new interdisciplinary composition involving musicians, a dancer and Emily using drawing as performance, which premiered at iii The Hague and Splendour in Amsterdam in 2019, directed by composer, cellist and sound artist Semay Wu. The piece was also broadcast on the Dutch National Radio NPO radio4. Emily is currently collaborating with composer, Amble Skuse, on a series of international soundwalks, the most recent of which was based in Plymouth and shown as part Plymouth University's event Walking's New Movements. Together they aspire to travelling and mapping locations through sound and drawing throughout 2020/21.