Statement/Bio

My practice begins with awe and curiosity and spans weaving, textiles, sculpture, and drawing, operating as a unified material investigation. I work with dense surfaces, bold color, and accumulative processes to create objects and installations with strong physical and spatial presence.

Over the past several years, my work has been shaped by experiences of loss, surgery, and sustained bodily change, unfolding alongside broader social and environmental instability. These conditions inform how I approach material and labor. Fibers are stretched, bound, layered, and repeated through time-intensive processes that register endurance, repair, and persistence rather than resolution.

I am drawn to softness, excess, and accumulation as formal and structural strategies. Brightness and humor coexist with weight and tension, complicating assumptions around vulnerability, monumentality, and seriousness. Drawing functions as both a conceptual and structural tool, informing pattern, gesture, and spatial organization across media.

Rather than viewing grief as a static narrative or singular catharsis, I treat it as an ongoing condition embedded in material and process. The work holds contradiction without hierarchy, allowing tenderness and force to remain visible at the same time. Through this approach, I am interested in joyful survival as a lived, material reality shaped by repetition, care, and sustained attention.

Emily lives and works in Los Angeles where she is a Professor at Santa Monica College in the Sculpture Department and the Director/Curator of the Pete and Susan Barrett Gallery.

Emily alongside Svetlana Shigroff and Liv Aanrud co-founded LA Tactile Lab www.LATactileLab.com

Formerly, a co-director and founder of Unpaved Gallery, an artist-run space that began in the hi-desert of California  www.unpavedgallery.com Unpaved went on hiatus in 2022

Contact: emilysilverstudio@gmail.com