An artist's affliction: Emma Stibbon in conversation

I came to the interview with Emma Stibbon as a complete outsider: I’d never heard of her, never seen her work. My only preparation was an intriguing paragraph in the Cultural Exchanges booklet. I left the event knowing more about Stibbon and her work than I do about Van Gogh. 

I left that talk a fan.

The set-up was simple: Stibbon and Theo Miller, her interviewer, sat at a small table at the front of the lecture hall, with just a table lamp for light. Overhead, a PowerPoint looped through a selection of photos of Stibbon and her artwork. It was simple, open, and intimate: a feeling mirrored in Stibbon’s speech and the warmth with which she answered Miller’s questions.

 Many of the early questions focused on Stibbon’s journeys around the world to study landscapes for her art: Rome, Berlin, Hawaii, and even Antarctica have made appearances in her striking monochrome artworks.

 More than once, an image would appear just as she was talking about somewhere she’d been or something she’d seen. A photo of Stibbon sketching the bleak Antarctic on a tiny boat showed up just seconds after she made an offhand comment about drawing in miserable cold places.

Honest and open, she invited us to enter her world, and made a genuine impression on me and many others. Of everything she said, though, nothing rang so true as her answer to Miller's question on work-life balance:

“It’s a compulsion, or even an affliction, to be an artist.”

Ben Woore

Driven to art: encountering Emma Stibbon

Emma Stibbon RA, Hverir, Iceland.
Photo taken from The Royal Academy of Arts 

Plunging straight into the interview, Theo Miller asked Emma Stibbon what inspires her work. Her response immediately conveyed her personality as she explained that she's driven most by the urge to communicate.

Emma has always had a love of drawing and an interest in changing landscapes. Both are combined in her art.

"A lot of your work could be seen as quite dark, is this what you like to create?" a member of the audience asked. Stibbon continued by explaining that Berlin, a place which has been the source for many of her works, is a beautiful and exciting city, but like any other also has real traumas. Stibbon's work is a wake-up call.

Stibbon is currently in talks with project pressure, a charity that works with artists around the world. Their aim is to give audiences a wider understanding of the world. 

Meanwhile Emma's work continues to draw her to new places. She is  excited to at the prospect of exploring the Himalayas later this year.

Megan Louise

Fine art - I need fine knowledge

It's my lack of knowledge of fine art that has led me to book for Emma Stibbon's workshop.  I want to know more about the subject, not least because I've several friends who have studied it.

Emma Stibbon has a page on the University of Brighton website, where she now teaches. This gives a timeline of her exhibitions which led to her current international profile. The video above shows an example of her work when she explored the history of places - a project which involved a field trip to Antarctica.

Stibbon's awards for her work include one from the British School at Rome. I'm excited to learn more about both fine art and Emma Stibbon. I hope that afterwards I have a wider understanding of what it is my friends do.


Megan Louise