Emma Pinsent

Emma Pinsent is an artist, educator and arts-worker living and working between Arakwal, Gadigal and Darkinjung lands. Her artistic research employs site-responsive methods to examine the materiality of specific locations. Guided by fieldwork, walking, archival research, consultation, and material production, she responds to the latent ecological and industrial circumstances of specific places, which inform her sculptural installations.

In 2019, she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at UNSW: Art & Design, and in 2022 began a PhD (Art & Design) at the same institution, supported by the Australian Government RTP Scholarship. She has presented in group, duo, and solo exhibitions in Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, and Tasmania at publicly funded ARI spaces and a commercial gallery. She has been a finalist in several awards.

Her PhD practice-based research, jointly supervised by Dr David Eastwood and Dr Bianca Hester and tentatively titled ‘Porous material afterlives of an intertidal zone’, examines how the porous materiality of a specific intertidal zone can transform an artistic response within the climate crisis. The project responds to Belongil Beach, an area where she lived previously, situated within the Arakwal coastline in the Northern Rivers region of NSW. It identifies porosity as a key material and ecological indicator of the site –– a space of porous borders –– where land and sea meet. Porosity is employed as a methodology for investigations of this zone. Artistic research is guided by fieldwork; consultation; archives; self-reflexive, embodied writing; material production; and site-responsive sculptural installations presented through exhibitions.

The research, conducted both locally and off-site, explores the entanglements between foreshore private property, erosion mitigation and histories of heavy mineral sand mining through a contemporary art context. Residues from past and present defunct sea walls, post-consumer waste, industrial mineral refinement and mining ‘rehabilitation’, drive the material experimentation and site-responsive sculptural installations within exhibition contexts. The project proposes a site-responsive artistic mode that implicates the eroding materiality of a particular receding shoreline within a standardised contemporary art context, specifically, the white cube.