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Artist statement

Presented as a dreamlike journey through unfamiliar jungles, O’Hara emphasises the longing felt by many throughout the pandemic to submerge oneself within landscape. Emma generously grants the viewer access to her own experiences allowing them to explore and experience new landscapes while highlighting the necessity and our obligation to protect it. The work depicts lush and verdant, fantasy landscapes that evoke a sense of the sublime, nostalgia and wanderlust through immersive paintings, vivid paper works and ceramic vessels. These imagined paradises exist outside of any particular time or space allowing a more visceral experience that creates a sense of reverie and suspended sensation. The work explores the relationship between desire and dreams, culminating in ferociously lucid, imaginary landscapes. The work conjures the memory of a landscape rather than a specific site. Scale of the work draws the viewer into the landscape and by proxy into the memory. The spontaneity of the marks flowing over the surface suggest movement within the landscape itself, further immersing the viewer in the fantasy. All the while, colour and abstraction are used to remind the viewer that this is a dream, a subtle gesture that aims to highlight the urgency of our current environmental crisis and the danger posed to our natural environment.