Rory Emmett

Rory Emmett was born in 1992 in Cape Town, South Africa, where he currently lives and works. He completed his BAFA at Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT in 2014, where he majored in painting and won the Judy Steinberg Painting Prize in his final year. Emmett was a Sasol New Signatures Merit award winner in 2015 and his work can be found in a number of private and corporate collections. He began teaching art at Cedar High School of the Arts in 2016-2018 and subsequently completed his PGCE with art and design didactics at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in 2017. Emmett now works as a full-time practising artist whilst teaching on a part-time basis at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Emmett works in a de-constructivist approach to the language, performance and alchemy of painting. Often employing both allegory and reality, his projects attempt to explore notions of space, knowledge and identity creation towards a metaphysical and spiritual state of transcendence - an attempt at elevation beyond the mundane. Emmett interrogates colour and its various ideological and material implications, referencing the personal and political by working with what he finds around and within himself as his most immediate point of departure. Consulting Eurocentric ideals of beauty and success that perpetually infiltrate the contemporary African landscape, Emmett attempts to draw attention to that which is sometimes taken for granted and often "normalized". Through various devices within the lens of painting, he attempts to explore dominant discourses surrounding South Africa’s growing democracy and somewhat idealistic notions of ‘Rainbowism’.

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