emily joy

I am a Boston-based artist, writer, and educator. I see my work as an expansion of reality, offering a dream-like landscape for memories, feelings, and revelations to exist. I often pull from family history, including vintage photographs of my late grandfather’s life and ancestry. I am also often called to reiterate my own dreams and nightmares, or simply illustrate a certain moment in abundant feeling. The ultimate goal for my visual and written work is to create an understanding between the beauty of the natural world and the painful human interruptions within it—to create a safer place for hard feelings. The following poem functions as my artist statement.

In the gentleness of the natural world, we can still recognize violence in soft forms.
Here is a world built for the complexity of feeling to live within, safely.
Someone is with you here, whether that’s good or bad. 
A curious and silent friend, or the ghost of a masculine, haunting shadow.
In dreams or in memory, there is a sense of weightlessness, transparency.
Another version of you (or me) (or my mother) (or hers) existing in that memory, measuring the distance between physical and emotional space. 
In the mystery of a forgotten photograph, the projected story of familial ghosts,
In the bravery of girls I wish I was, 
and in the thread we use to tie ourselves to others and our past,
we close the gap of historical distance in a space foreign but familiar.

Emily is a current 2023 Creative Entrepreneur Fellow with the Arts and Business Council of Greater Boston. Her residencies include World of Co. Bulgaria, and Inside-Out Art Museum Beijing. More information can be found on her CV.