Emily Hunt creates ornamental, figurative ceramics. Her history as a rare-book dealer has informed her encyclopedic approach to her art-making.
Emily Hunt’s artistic practice critically engages with the historical and cultural significance of ornament and grotesque imagery as vehicles for subversion and transgression. Her ongoing research focuses on Renaissance print media, particularly the occult philosophy of this period and its relationship to grotesque ornament and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque.
Through drawing, painting, etching, and ceramics, Hunt investigate the visual technology of magic in its symbolic form and how it shares a lineage with ornamental forms. She examines how these visual languages—such as carnivalesque, ornament, and magical practice—reflect societal attitudes, transgressive behaviours, and esoteric traditions. She is interested in how these three positions overlap and allow for a rapture or ecstatic moment. Her research is concerned with the influence of magical and occult philosophy on visual culture. She create tools such as rings and marionettes to open up spaces where art and magic can enter into conversation.
Emily Hunt currently lives and works between Sydney and Berlin and exhibits internationally.
In 2017, Emily Hunt undertook a nine-month residency at Schloss Balmoral in Bad Ems. This residency provided an opportunity to expand both her research and professional network. During this time, she developed a new body of ceramic works at the renowned Ebinger-Schnass ceramic workshop, which were exhibited at the Arp Museum, Bahnhof Rolandseck, in 2018.
In 2020 she was awarded a scholarship for the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt. This opportunity significantly broadened her professional network and led to a collaboration with curator Solvej Helweg Ovesen, who organised a solo exhibition of her work at Galerie Wedding. The exhibition later travelled to the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art in Ghana, where she worked alongside artist and co-curator Ibrahim Mahama.
In 2022, Hunt was awarded a three-month residency at 1646 Experimental Art Space in The Hague. Her representation with the London-based commercial gallery Sim Smith began in 2023, where she has presented two solo exhibitions, Crystal Radio Geist and Ecstasy.
In 2024, Hunt was invited to present her first museum exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, which focused on esoteric figures within the Australian context. Her forthcoming solo museum exhibition will open in September 2025 at Huis van het Boek (The House of the Book) in The Hague—the world’s oldest book museum—marking her first solo museum show in Europe.
Hunt has been running Big Ego Books with Raquel Caballero since 2015. She was the co~Dictator of DUKE Magazine, an artist magazine focusing on Australian artists, thrift culture and celebrities between 2005~2009.
Represented by Sim Smith Gallery, London
Contact email:
mail@sim-smith.com
emilyhunt.research@gmail.com