Emmanuelle Orr
Emmanuelle is a French artist based in London and Paris, working across a range of printmaking techniques (screen printing, intaglio, and other techniques) to produce original, limited edition prints.
After graduating with a fine art degree (Arts Plastiques) from Paris I university, she moved to London in 1997 where she built a successful career in market research. In 2018 she decided to pursue more creative endeavours full time, and have been developing her practice ever since.
Her work has been exhibited in the UK (London, Bath, Glastonbury, Doncaster) and internationally (Paris, Berlin) and she has won the Art Hub studio prize at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in 2022.
Artist Statement
Her practice spans several techniques, from screenprinting to intaglio, each exploring colour and form in different ways.
Her recent screenprinting projects explore how printmaking forces images to disintegrate into light, colours and shapes, pulled apart and fragmented by the printing process itself. Halftones and gradients suggest dissolution and force the eye to constantly switch focus, looping between the narrative of the full image, and the patterns of colour within it. Overlaid or offset layers fool the mind into reading unity and harmony where there is only disorder and conflicting information.
Intaglio is a more recent interest. She has been working with found or photographic materials, using etching, photopolymer and aquatint to transmit and transform images. Representation disappears as the material is taken through the printmaking process. The practice explores ideas of loss and alteration, memory and erasure, through the manipulation of existing fragments and the creation of new meaning and identity.
Through these different mediums, her practice sets out to represent the liminal moments and in-between spaces of our world. Whether focusing on bodies or landscape, she seeks out moments of vulnerability in a busy world, the silence among all the noise, the light in between the darkness. Her images slide and disappear, somewhere between real and unreal, mundane and uncanny, past and present, figurative and abstraction.
Her prints are based on my photographs and drawings, which she then work on digitally before printing them in London. She loves the endless possibilities of printing, and its physicality - how different sources and techniques can be used to arrive at a design, and how the printing process itself can take the work in an unexpected direction. The final piece is always something both unique and repeated, accidental and deliberate.
