Emma Cousin

Exploring ideas of support, mobility, and progress, Emma Cousin employs metaphor as a visual tool to expose the gap between literal and figurative meaning. Often sparked by a piece of wordplay, her process moves fluidly through comedic, cartoonish, psychological, and imaginative interpretations, generating a rich visual language. Her paintings frequently depict figures engaged in private puzzles, interpersonal dynamics, or forms of communication, where vibrant compositions and elongated, playful bodily forms enact alternative possibilities. Cousin’s drawings emphasize linguistic wit and wordplay, while simultaneously interrogating the structure of language, its embodiment, and the consequences of its failure. Her characters are informed by personal experience, anatomical study, and somatic practices, inhabiting systems of bodies organized according to formal and diagrammatic logic. Within these frameworks, her avatars navigate dynamic, almost carnivalesque scenarios that explore the intersections of realism and fantasy, past and future, as well as physical sensation and everyday interaction. The resulting works balance precision with whimsy, creating a space where communication, movement, and meaning are continuously questioned and reimagined. ...