Emma Pinsent

Website: www.emmapinsent.com

Email: e.pinsent@student.unsw.edu.au

Supervisors: David Eastwood, Bianca Hester

Emma Pinsent is an artist, researcher, and arts administrator based between the unceded lands of the Arakwal people of the Bundjalung Nation and the Gadigal-Bidjigal people of the Eora Nation. Her artistic research engages sculptural and installation processes to explore porosity and entanglement between humans and nonhuman nature. The transformation of waste forms an important facet of her work; she is interested in how residual materials from our local environment and extractive industries can be reconfigured to reveal complex interdependencies within place.

Her PhD practice-based research, jointly supervised by Dr David Eastwood and Dr Bianca Hester, tentatively titled (Re)worlding porous materials of the intertidal zone through response-able installation practice examines porosity within intertidal zones of Arakwal beaches in Northern NSW to test “response-able” exchanges between maker, materials, processes and environments in a time of climate crisis. Her methodology responds to encounters with porosity within the intertidal zone, informed by situated fieldwork, consultation and walking. Sculptural experiments engaged on and off-site, aim to reveal fraught entanglements between colonial legacies of extraction, property, ecology, weather and waste.

In 2019 she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at UNSW: Art & Design, and in 2022 began a PhD (Art & Design) at the same institution supported by the Australian Government RTP Scholarship. She has exhibited across Sydney and in Brisbane, Tasmania, and Canberra in both commercial and ARI spaces and has been a finalist in a number of awards.