Emily Platzer

Emily Platzer (b. 1989, Hampshire, UK) is a British artist living and working in Paris.

Platzer’s practice is based in painting and expands this field to incorporate sculpture and textiles. She prefers working in formats that allow for full gestural expression with the gestures within the work reaching towards a bodily rather than overtly figurative outcome, forming feminine entities that propose nuanced interpretation of female archetypes. Emerging from a process that is intuitive, methodical and ritualistic, Platzer’s work is a rhythmic evocation of form, energy and colour that transcends mere abstraction or representation. Her narratives become experiential through a cadence of fluidity and tension, elation and restraint, intimacy and expansion, anchored by intention and temporality. Harnessing elemental and universal energies through a cyclical journey encompassing the physical and the spiritual, her practice becomes a realm where inception, essence and expression are inseparably entwined.

Platzer collects and processes natural pigments via her own adaptations and traditional distemper and egg tempura techniques, using them alongside chemically synthesised colours. These hues are decided and prepared in advance of her entering the work, with each colour possessing its own energy and materiality. By painting ith pigments, Platzer says she begins to understand their individual characteristics—the material properties which determine how the colour behaves; heavy, light, coarse, matt, transparent, or iridescent. Her work considers how colour is procured and processed and the mythology surrounding these colours within culture. This aspect of her practice also involves searching for naturally occurring pigments, and the resulting paintings are installed in the landscape that these pigments originated: a cyclical process of returning a painting to its material origins. Using natural earth pigments in combination with chemically synthesised pigments, she perceives a tension between visible and invisible forces. Platzer believes that if earth pigments ground us, then perhaps synthesised pigments make us think of the stars—they each have their own magic.

Platzer explains “Through painting I enter both the physical and psychological space of the canvas, I set an intention and make the painting within one visit. The scale of the work often reflects what is just within arm span reach, connecting the edges of my body to the work. I reach, find an edge but aim to turn inwards. I experience a commonality between painting and shamanic practice. In each process we establish a touchstone, we journey in order to ask a question or receive healing, it is durational, and it follows a rhythm. The sound of the drum draws me into the painting experience and calls me back.”

'Colours are kinds of light, all earthy colours such as black, earth, leaden, brown have a relation to Saturn. Sapphire and airy colours and those which are always green belong to Mercury. Purple, darkish and golden mixed with silver belong to Jupiter. Fiery, flaming, bloody and iron colour to Mars. Golden, saffron and bright colours to the Sun, and white, curious, green and ruddy colours to Venus.'

- Cornelius Agrippa, 1533

She typically completes a painting in one sitting, and describes her process as experiential: a symbiosis of material processes, time, physicality and intention open to subconscious and unconscious influences. 

Platzer is a graduate of Falmouth College of Art (2011) and the Royal College of Art and Design (2019).

SOLO EXHIBITION: I KEEP THE WHOLE OF YOU IN THE EDGES OF MY EYES ~ 31 JANUARY - 4 MARCH 2020

Exhibition: here ~ 10 october - 18 november 2023

EXHIBITION: IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS ~ 20 DECEMBER 2019 - 23 JANUARY 2020

Interview with Emily Platzer