Em Hatton won’t apologise for her calm and joyful femme figures
words: Janek Drevikovsky
photos: Nick Bonyhady
Everything in Em Hatton’s studio is on wheels – her paint trays (gouache and acrylic), her easels (canvas), her drawers (high-quality print paper), her shelves (artbooks), her computer desk (iMac, with classic Windows XP desktop – see below). This is a space designed to be redesignable, by a full-time designer turned full-time artist, into whatever shape will nurture the calm and joy Em imbues into her paintings and prints.
“What I create when I make my work, I’m trying to share some of the peace I want in my own life,” Em says, gesturing at the painted female forms that line her studio walls and floors, where they recline, contemplate, exist, and:
- ponder creation in a spa-bath-sized tin of mackerel
- ride on the back of a gargantuan red prawn
- lounge in cocktail glass filled with pink prawns and lettuce (1970s dinner party hit/nightmare)
(Why the crustaceans? “I love prawns. They’re vivid, silly and a bit surreal”. They’re also pink/red and therefore dead/cooked, Em tells me)
Resting, riding or raging under the female gaze
These are “femme figures,” Em tells me, “unapologetically resting, riding or raging”, under the female gaze. They’re comfortable enough to bathe in seafood, and powerful enough to efface art’s long-practised male gaze with “softness and calmness or joy”. This joy and positivity, Em says, is her form of protest:
“How can I take something that’s shameful or challenging or has made me feel bad in the past, and how can I subvert that or make something positive from that?”
Her latest series features women from myth, including Eve, holding a half-eaten apple, asleep atop a coiled blue-and-purple mega-snake, which has been reduced to a “beanbag”, as Em puts it. Freud is shaking and crying.
Em turns most of her paintings into extremely chic, limited series art prints, available on her online store, which she sees as part of the mind-meeting that art makes possible:
“I love when people buy my stuff and it lives in their house as part of their life as well.”
To make the journey to print, each painting scores a high-quality photo shoot – which Em can do right here in her Mothership studio, thanks to the “ridiculously good” natural light that pours in through the room-wide skylight.
Actually the lighting is so good that Em has strung a shade cloth over the middle of the space, for better diffusion/to avoid sunburn (?).
Colour, colour, colour, super flat block colour
All of Em’s confident, femme figures begin with rough sketches, in a “kid’s sketch pad” that she carries with her for moments of inspiration. Then follow digital drawings and detailed colour blocking, until finally, Em paints, mostly in the matte tones of gouache, a paint that combines the malleability of watercolour with the opacity of acrylic.
Gouache lets Em achieve the “super flat and block colours” that she favours, demarcated with “clean lines”, in the tradition of Japanese wood-block print and artists like Laura Callaghan, gouache chronicler of late stage capitalism.
Em’s colouration is striking, with a different scheme for every piece, inspired by “random places” – like the Windows XP background, which she adores for its clean juxtaposition of cerulean sky and too-green grassland, like something from the set designer who did Tellytubbies.
Em attributes her love of colour to her background in graphic design, an industry she left only at the start of this year, when she turned to her art practice full time. A painter since childhood, she began her path to professional art with a double diagnosis – long COVID and endometriosis – and the long recovery period that followed, during which she turned more and more to painting.
Art fairs, live painting, connection and community
Now Em’s desk calendar is dotted with little aeroplane stickers, a roster of constant travel to art fairs and events around Australia, where she shows her paintings, teaches art workshops and does live painting nights for endometriosis fundraising.
She’s busier than ever, but more fulfilled than ever, she tells me, because of the connection that her practice embodies:
“I love chatting to people, meeting people, having those conversations, meeting with other artists who have that ethos as well.
“Art’s a community building thing.”