"Emily Kraus: Interview" by Sam Cornish

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2022, Emily Kraus has made a name for herself with dramatic, innovative abstract paintings. She works using a purpose-built painting mechanism, with the canvas looped between four poles to form an immersive and mobile painting environment. Following her first solo exhibition in New York, with Luhring Augustine, here Kraus discusses the challenge of architecture, the mistake of conceiving the analogue and the digital as a binary, and the difference between working at large and small scale. Perhaps above all, her art engages with the question: “How can I be free and be human and expressive through the language of a mechanised world?”

Sam Cornish: Part of the anthropomorphism of your paintings must come from the interaction of your body, its scale and its movement, with the painting cage or loom you have developed. How has this mechanism evolved since you developed it at the Royal College of Art? I’m thinking in terms of technical process and the final images that result from this process.

Emily Kraus: The mechanism has evolved for the sake of functionality; its purpose is exactly the same as when I began. At first, I used shower poles, bought at a DIY shop, and wooden brackets that I cobbled together from scrap in the workshop; the canvas lined the walls, ceiling and floor of my 8ft x 8ft (2.4 sq metres) studio space and was constantly falling apart. Now I’ve designed a steel structure that is much easier to move around, secured with bearings that allow the structure to rotate with ease. I still operate it by hand (without a motor) – it remains entirely analogue. 

Read full interviewat studiointernational.com.