"Emily Kraus Interview"

Emily Kraus on finding freedom within confinement, responding to isolation, & working towards a major upcoming exhibition.

How did you get into making art?

It’s my way of being in the world…I was never not into making art. I spent a while in my teens and into my twenties trying not to be an artist. But it’s the truest version of my reality.

What are you currently working on?

I’m continuing to work on the Stochastic Series. I am working towards my first solo show (at The Sunday Painter gallery in London) which means that I am thinking about how to create and curate work into a body that lives together and in relation one another, ultimately creating an effect on the viewer. I understand everything I experience through my body’s physical relationship to space. I employ this in the making process and also in how I consider the work will be viewed. One of the rooms of the gallery where I will present my show has 18-foot ceilings, so I am using the height to create an environment that envelops the viewer inside the paintings, just like I am when I create them. To create this environment in which space effects the body, I have changed the dimensions of the mechanism I use to make the paintings. This provides new logistical and physical challenges.

What inspired you to get started on this body of work?

This body of work arose in response to the conditions of my studio at the Royal College of Art. I started my Painting MA in the fall of 2020 and for the first year we did not have studios due to COVID. Being confined at home and tasked with writing a dissertation in the first year of the masters, I became obsessed with space, confinement, and surfaces. I read and theorized and wrote a lot about surfaces/boundaries of objects/places/bodies and also how to move through boundaries or relate differently to them. [I thought about the surfaces of objects/places/beings and the relationships between them.] When I returned for my second year at RCA, I was assigned a studio that was an 8×8 foot cube with no windows and bad lighting. (This was due to the college oversubscribing the program, an endemic problem at the RCA, and taking on a building not meant to be studios in order to accommodate the larger numbers.) It was like a cell or cubical. Previous to this, I had worked at a large scale, stretching the limits of my body with large gestures and playing with orientations of space (wall/ceiling/floor, etc.). In this studio, I didn’t have room to move my body around or stand back from the paintings to see them in their entirety. Once again, I found myself in a contained space. In an attempt to use the space more efficiently and work on multiple surfaces at once, I wrapped the 8x8ft cube in canvas, stitching it into a loop and holding it in place in each corner with shower rods. This construction allowed me to change the painting more easily by rotating the canvas. As I worked with this system, wet paint began to travel unexpectedly around the canvas, distributed by the very poles that were simply meant to hold it in place. This error ultimately grew into the Stochastic paintings.

Read full article at hopperprize.org