Emma Leadbetter, (b.1998), is a painter from Shropshire now based in London. Playfully reacting to environmental tensions alongside a compression of documented memories, she recognises how her bodily functions have a grasp on her painting practice and toys with strategies of humour and gesture; contradictions are at the centre of all her works adjacent to the theme of timelessness. 

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"I pull a microscope on my spontaneous approach by exploring my space identification in-between landscape and figuration, creating pulsing scenes and stories with multiple levels of symbolism that simultaneously gut into and peek out; leaving no conclusions. Seeing each piece as both linear and in clutter with others, the paintings can communicate through reoccurring abstractions or wordplay in titles. Out of impulse, I started calling my paintings ‘Landscape Figures’ and despite that being a combination of the two words, it is not about that kind of force, more so a mocking force in-between where I make these functioning other-worldly spaces in an unfixed state without containment or restriction. I see each piece as having its own movement, weather, and everyday tasks in no hierarchy and lean into the landscape being the figure and the figure being the landscape."

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