Emma de Polnay

Emma is a mixed media artist whose practice emerges from the meeting point of nature, storytelling, and transformation. Her work begins with long walks along the Sussex coastline, a sparkling shoreline scattered with salt-bleached fragments of natural and man-made matter. What begins as a beach clean becomes a kind of alchemy: a treasure hunt, a meditative ritual, and the first act of creation.

Drawing from her background in sculpture, set design, and life drawing, Emma creates highly textured, dynamic, and often theatrical compositions. Her paintings and works on paper blend recycled collage, beach finds, and traditional media into layered, tactile surfaces. Iridescent and metallic pigments frequently crown her pieces — “the final sparks of ignition,” she says — illuminating them with the same energy and shimmer that inspire her by the sea.

Emma’s work is deeply influenced by the ever-changing canvas of the natural world, as well as myth, folklore, and the languages of love from Ancient Greece. Recurring motifs of flight, dance, and mythic female deities explore emotional states rather than literal likenesses, capturing how a subject feels rather than how it appears.

A graduate of Wimbledon Art School and Kingston University, Emma began her career as a set designer for film and television before turning fully to fine art. She has exhibited widely across the UK and internationally, including in Ste-Marguerite-sur-Mer as part of a celebration of French and English coastal artists.