Emma Woolley is a Birmingham-based figurative painter whose work explores shifting psychological states through portraiture, repetition, and emotional fragmentation.
Working primarily in oil, charcoal, and oil stick, her paintings examine the tension between identity, perception, and internal experience. Through repeated forms, subtle changes in expression, and stacked totemic compositions, the work reflects the unstable and constantly shifting nature of emotion and selfhood.
Her recent practice has evolved into sequential portrait structures that behave almost like moving images across multiple canvases. Faces repeat, shift, dissolve, and re-emerge, creating what Emma describes as psychological monuments, portraits built from memory, instinct, tension, and emotional residue.
Paint is layered, erased, disrupted, and reworked repeatedly, allowing traces of movement and process to remain visible within the final surface. Minimal backgrounds and tightly cropped compositions place full focus on gesture, expression, and emotional presence.
Alongside her painting practice, Emma works professionally as an Art Director within a long-standing creative career spanning branding, motion, publishing, and visual storytelling. The relationship between these two worlds continues to shape her approach to image-making, rhythm, structure, and emotional communication.
Her work has been exhibited across Birmingham and the West Midlands through solo and collaborative exhibitions, and continues to evolve through an ongoing exploration of portraiture, identity, and human connection.
A Dual Creative Life
Alongside my painting practice, I’ve spent over two decades working within the creative industry as an Art Director, designer, and visual storyteller. My background spans branding, publishing, motion graphics, photography, film, and 3D visualisation, shaping the way I think about image-making, rhythm, emotional communication, and visual structure.
While commercial creative work often demands clarity, strategy, and precision, painting allows for something more instinctive and open-ended. The two worlds constantly inform one another. My design background sharpens my sensitivity to composition, pacing, tone, and visual tension, while painting keeps me connected to uncertainty, emotion, and experimentation.
Rather than existing separately, both practices have gradually become intertwined, each influencing the way I observe, construct, and communicate human experience through images.
Timeline
2000s — BA (Hons) Fine Art, University of Wolverhampton
2000s — BA (Hons) Graphic Design & Illustration, Coventry University
2000–Present — Art Director & Designer in advertising, branding, motion graphics, and 3D design
2024 — The Wonder Series: Solo exhibition, • nook • gallery & studios, Birmingham
2025 — The Space Between Us: Ongoing body of work exploring intimacy and connection
2025 — Shortlisted for the Women in Art Prize 2025, in the Paula Rego Painting Prize category
In Short
I’m an artist and art director who works in oil paint, charcoal, and instinct. My canvases are not just portraits, but conversations -between myself, the people I paint, and the unseen space we share.
A contemporary painting practice rooted in Birmingham
Based in Birmingham, Emma Woolley’s portrait practice focuses on intimacy, connection, and emotional closeness. Her work centres the human face, using painting as a way to explore presence, vulnerability, and lived experience.