Emilia Seoyeon Pang
Castle Hill High School
LACED INTO OUR LIVES
Painting
Oil on canvas, Acrylic on canvas
My body of work explores how the constant flux of life affects us all. Fascinated by existential philosophy, I examined humanity's search for the meaning of life and how that meaning changes across our lives. A series of shoes expresses the life stages, focusing on the attributes people have gained from their past. The shoes are worn down by walking through each moment of life, creating the wrinkles, the softness of the materials or the brightness in colour. Each stroke, line and colour is intended to represent the piece of ourselves that originated from that moment.
My artmaking practice has been influenced by the study and interpretation of the following artists: Kim Starr, Claude Monet.
Marker's Commentary
Laced Into Our Lives is a confident painting series that richly explores the biorhythm of opportunities and the engagement with life. The self-assured relationships between the stages of humanity are authentically executed through a variety of personalities and their respective pairs of shoes, staged with relatable backdrops. Confident, consistent tonal rendering and realism with considered cropping and viewpoints invite the viewer to the familiar shoes, reiterated in personal experience and memory using vivid colour, with blurred background which connects to the stages of life. The seven panels of curated imagery within this body of work evokes a knowing sense of comfort and empathy in celebrating the personal freedom and purpose of life.