Emma Cousin
- Anna Lilli Garai
- 7 days ago
- 8 min read
Emma Cousin’s paintings often begin with a word or phrase that lingers. From there, she builds outwards with drawings, shapes, and figures that feel caught mid-gesture. The bodies bend and stretch, full of intention and uncertainty. Her process follows its own rhythm, led by language, movement, and instinct. Each painting grows step by step, inviting you to stay with it a little longer.
Q: You often start with a bit of wordplay. What makes a phrase stick enough to become a painting?
A: It is not so much that words stick, but that they offer a framework to connect, unpick, relate, revolve, undress, invert and build ideas. I love wordplay and make mind maps and diagrams and glossaries of words based on research around the proposal for the show or artwork I am working on. I read many books at once on the subjects, so they overlap in a way, which leads to uncanny and new connections.
Sometimes, the words come first — they can arrive as a prompt for an image. This is often a metaphor or proverb or a word that links to memory or connects to feeling. I like words that can mean opposing things at the same time — like “tanked,” meaning full up (drunk) and sunk (a flop). I often turn words over to mine their meanings, searching for visual connections or dissonances as well as ironies, literal meanings and allusions or the directions they can offer.
Ultimately, I am interested in the gaps in language, its beauty when it becomes abstract, and the missteps it offers socially and relationally.
I would say that for me it is the dialogue between drawing and words where something sticks.
This feels like an itch that prickles, crawling in my mind with the possibilities and problems of how to paint it, which is why it’s compelling.
Q: Your figures stretch, twist, lean—they always seem mid-action. What are they working through?
A: The figures are part of a system of paint exploring an idea. What they are working through is dependent on the idea. I enjoy considering how they can offer expanded proposals about our perceived limits, stereotypes, expectations, social and physical mobility, communication and relationships. I like the interplay between biology and geometry and how the two rub up and discord. The body, after all, is made up of this — intestines and elbows.
The exaggeration and simplification operate visually like cartoons, revving up the tension between the real and the felt and showing sensation and action. They are relatable, imaginative and humorous in this state. What the figures are doing in terms of shape provides the structure for the painting and organising principle of the work. Sometimes this is the initial intent — for example, thinking about snails and their shell formation (the spiral), so they might be twisting.
Mid-action is funny — it is ridiculous that paintings are static, and I try to make them move. Sometimes the lean or stretch of the figure is about pointing you around the canvas, drawing attention so that the ricochet I feel bouncing around when I am working can be experienced.
In terms of action, pace is inherent — the ideas and drawings come urgently, feeding and fuelling into the next thing, whilst painting can be slow, take time, and sometimes needs a breath-slowing, calm type of energy. The way the action is conveyed in this sense is entwined. Agency and fluency are considerations.
The joke of the body is that it’s always mid-action — leaking, being subject to gravity, aging. Sometimes I heighten or display these functions via their actions. It is impossible to use the body and not be conscious of slapstick, setting up systems (of figures) where things are building and collapsing.
I think about orientation and disorientation, and often there is a point when you are lost in the making of the painting — the painting itself seems to guide and reorient. It’s a paradox in motion, like relationships and plate tectonics.
Q: In "Pelican Vale" and "Cover Point", the body and landscape feel almost interchangeable. When did that overlap start to interest you?
A: The overlap started to interest me after a show with Niru Ratnam Gallery in 2024 called Tunnel Vision. I was seeking reorientation, contemplating where we (me and the figures in the paintings) would be when we came out of the tunnel. This question evolved as I spent time in the land (farmed, natural and coastal) on a residency at Hogchester on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, UK. My primary inquiry was how we could imbed into the land.
Landscape painting emphasises distance, the horizon, but I wanted the characters to become the landscape — be of it and in it reciprocally. I started to play with the land’s natural features, discovering with my body, fitting myself into tree stumps, wearing lichen, laying in layers of grass, mud and rock. I chewed rocks, covered myself in bark and drew animals I encountered.
I read books about geology, prehistory, and about the landscape in art history and in fiction. Hunting for fossils and finding brilliantly named land formations such as “Grannie’s Teeth” (some ancient steps naturally formed by the rocks) were important connections as I realised, of course, these overlaps were in nature already.
There were immediate comparable facets such as: contouring in maps and makeup; drawing to translate space and volume (cartography); geological formations paralleling anatomical ones. By looking at the land intensely in this way, I was able to visually connect the body and the land interchangeably. Seeing and feeling connections between things is a webbed but logical experience in my head. Personal, everyday experience feeds the overlaps too — from seeing a dandelion growing out of a gap in concrete to extreme food poisoning, which brought up (literally!) a huge range of new greens and yellows to add to my register.
It brings two seemingly disparate things in relation, which means I trust and listen to the interplays and lean into the interchangeable as a strategy.
Q: "Fossa" takes anatomy and natural forms and folds them together. How do you find the shape of a painting like that?
A: I like this — folding them together. This is accurate. Like baking, where things lose their edges and a new texture is found. I use drawing to puzzle out the shape of a painting, tessellating and oscillating parts and flipping things, layering them, drawing on top of them.
This happens when making a painting too — rotating a painting whilst making it is such a great technique for finding and re-finding shape, shifting the focus on what you see and how that leads formal decisions.
With "Fossa", my son (then aged 1–2) was obsessed with snails, so I was learning about them (if swallowed, could they kill you after he ate one whole?) and drawing them and playing with them with him.
Their natural swirl forms relate to Fibonacci, and when I looked closely at their patterns I could see plants, seahorses and clouds in the shell’s unique markings.
This took me to stained-glass windows, which seemed to offer the view outside, the view of their “picture” (often a figure in the landscape) and a linear landspace marked by the lead that related to my drawings of fields, divided similarly.
Thinking about shape and the body — fossa in anatomy is a shallow depression of hollows such as the neck, shoulders, wrists. I started to see them as valleys of the body. The repeat formed part of the shape finding, mimicking the spiralling of an ammonite and a snail.
These elements came together eventually in this painting, constructed like sedimentary rock, with sections wedged together in blocks marked by fissures, holding both the figurative (snail, ear, slime) and the geometric together.
Q: You bring up collecting, classifying, even danger in "Milkweed". What’s your take on how we try to control nature?
A: Visiting rocks in the British Museum, I came across various collections and their collectors and found their literal pinning down of nature hilarious and sad, awe-inspiring and disconcerting. Showing it off, categorising and displaying speaks to displacement, value, classification and display systems.
They are forms of control and ordering in a system (nature) which is chaotic, complex and often concealed. The peculiar thing is that when we get close to nature via the collected object, it can take us over, become our identity. I was interested in this “trying to control and being controlled by nature” component.
Reading folkloric and sci-fi texts, I discovered many stories of a woman becoming a tree in different ways. The plant was mostly the one in control in these stories, which varied from haunting to erotic, and posed unity with nature as threat and liberation.
The title "Milkweed" refers to a plant eaten by admiral butterflies that then makes them poisonous to bird predators. Nature has an incredible, diversified way of controlling things within itself and with us. I have a small garden and love working in it, and it constantly mocks my authority.
I was recently reading about warning signals in nature — like the sea changing colour when a poisonous algae is present to warn us not to eat the fish (that would have eaten the algae).
The cyclical nature of this is stunning, as is the absurdity that we rarely listen, pause to understand, or take the time to learn the movements of nature.
In making "Milkweed", I was reflecting on the opposite facility of the landscape as a refuge, as a resting place, a flight, an escape, a nest. Putting the landscape under pressure offered a physical direction on how to construct and prioritise things in making a composition, emphasising the import of weight, balance, constriction and layering. There’s a double irony in my trying to control a painting, when they mostly (the good ones at least) take over at some point.
Q: Your compositions feel carefully built but never too polished. How do you decide when to stop?
A: This is an age-old question that is not simple. It varies from painting to painting. Sometimes it is mystical and seems very clear, other times there is a deadline and the finality of responding to this is a differently oriented pressure.
Within a painting, there can also be the carefully planned areas and the parts of detailed attention — often where the focus is, e.g. in the mouth of one figure in "Milkweed", which is packed with a rainbow of shark teeth, or the cheek, which is impasto paint, wet into wet, mottled and patchworked like a butterfly wing.
If something needs to look like rust (a body underwater), it might demand layers and layers and feel like this application of thin paint process could go on and on. Sometimes, the initial progress is decisive and focused in a way that sections are finished in front of your eyes. When you get out of the way, they happen.
Other times it’s a niggling slog, where parts of the painting are nudging and talking to you — “red over here,” or “that fits here,” etc. This is enjoyable too, but can feel like a never-ending collaboration. And if the painting’s voice goes quiet, it can be disarming — left on your own to muddle it out. I suppose that’s why it feels magic.
I think you know when you come into the studio and it has an energy that feels new to you — a surprising resonance, like a hum or an enharmonic caught between notes as they reverb. I often describe my paintings as noisy, and this is what I mean: when it’s working, a group of paintings can feel like they are chatting or even singing together. It is something unexpected and feels light and startling. At its best, that’s when to stop.
