Emma Fielden is an Australian artist whose practice spans performance, drawing, painting, installation, sound and moving image. Her practice seeks moments of resonance through embodied engagement with materials, space and time. Informed by her background in music and metalsmithing, her work unfolds through processes shaped by materiality, composition, rhythm, vibration and duration, giving rise to artworks that register transformation, traces of presence and relational encounter.

Fielden is attentive to the latent energies and shifting conditions that emerge between bodies, materials, sound and space. She works within moments that open into duration and are made palpable over time. Through embodied actions such as breathing, moving, marking, sounding, crushing and dispersal, materials including paper, silver and stone are transformed—ground into pigment, inscribed into surfaces, set into motion—registering the force, duration and intensity of each act. Across these processes, surfaces, forms and recordings operate as archival fields of accumulation and change.

Fielden holds a Master of Fine Arts (Research) from the University of New South Wales, where her practice-based research explored inherited materialities and embodied practices. She also holds an Advanced Diploma of Jewellery and Object Design, and an Associate Diploma in Music (performance).

Her work has been exhibited for over two decades, with recent solo exhibitions including The Sky Swallowed a Stone (UNSW Galleries, 2025), accompanied by a publication with essays by Julie Ewington, and Hours of Stars (Passage, 2024). She has been included in major group exhibitions such as Infinite: Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2024), The Unseen (Blacktown Arts Centre, 2023), and Radical Slowness (The Lock-Up, 2022).

Her work From Breath (2024), developed as a live durational performance at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, was recently shortlisted as a finalist in The 69th Blake Prize. She has received numerous awards, including the Paramor Prize Mayoral Award (Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, 2017), and has been a finalist in awards including the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (2025), Mosman Art Prize (2024), Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (2022), and National Works on Paper (2022).

Emma has undertaken residencies at Art Omi, New York (2018), The Lock-Up (2019), and was a resident at Parramatta Artists’ Studios for over five years. She is currently a sessional lecturer at the University of New South Wales, School of Art & Design.

Image: From Breath