Tod’s work explores the transformative potential of paint in a period of digital image circulation, with its accelerating speeds of transmission and shared attention deficit. Works negotiate this shift through stillness and ambiguity. Peripheral events, fleeting moments, and chance encounters are brought to the centre creating new imaginary territories. Visual fragments taken from the internet, TV, and art history are playfully recombined and erased. Zones of exclusion are brought to the fore, challenging the primacy of centre over periphery. Layers of transparent glaze are built to create a shallow depth of field that replicates the luminosity of the screen. Here, figurative and non-figurative elements meet, collide, and are altered by each other. Fluctuating areas of colour and bodies of paint are expanded and foregrounded. Ambiguity invites us to speculate, to create meaning playfully, offering a counterpoint to the directed and surveilled nature of our digital lives.

Emma  Tod studied painting at Falmouth School of Art before gaining her MFA in Fine Art Media at The Slade School of Art, University College London. She was selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries and has been a member of a number of artists run organisations including Gasworks and Lux Critical Forum She has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad including the ICA and the Royal Academy and has attended residencies in Budapest and Cape Town. Emma is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at University of the Arts London.  Recently she has been shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize and the Contemporary British Painting Prize where she received the Blyth Gallery Award.