Emma Wills

Emma Wills’ work begins in a laboratory of inquiry, where material processes operate symbiotically, through form and analysis, informed by Feminist Materialism and Biopolitics. By investigating the mechanics of printmaking, Wills engages in a discourse with reproductive technologies, exploring how repetition in artistic practice often mirrors the cyclical nature of medicalised monitoring of bodies. These processes reflect motifs of medicalisation, gestation, assisted reproduction, infertility and labour.

Printmaking operates through cycles of abrasion, incision, pressure and reproduction - patterns of performance that resemble the motions associated with childbirth and continuous medical monitoring. The work matures through continuous engagement with intaglio procedures which commands physical pressure and endurance. In this regard, the work reclaims printmaking as a form of embodied creation and biological reproduction.

The artist utilises fruit as surrogate forms to consider the female body as a vessel - one that is unfolded, surveilled and fragmented within medical and reproductive contexts. These fruits propose an alternative, material reading of the body, asking to be viewed as complete entities rather than through assessments of efficiency.