Cool Hunter: Emma Buswell
Emma Buswell transforms kitsch cultural moments like the Coles roast chicken bachelor’s handbags into labour-intensive textile works that probe power, mythology, and the absurdities of contemporary Australian life.
Words | Christina Chau
Photography | Bianca Woolhouse
Emma Buswell in her studio. Photo: Bianca Woolhouse.
Emma Buswell is a West Australian-based artist, writer, and curator well known for her large-scale tapestries and knitted works that explore power, culture, and mythology through kitsch and art historical visual tropes. Her work is a humorous endeavour in blending the visual hierarchy between grand narratives and everyday visual culture, while experimenting with scale, form and production.
Buswell’s career has steadily gained traction in the last 15 years leading up to her 2025 Ramsay Art Prize People’s Choice award. She was a resident at Fondazione Antonio Ratti (2011), part of the Australia Council for the Arts Venice Biennale professional development program (2015), was a featured artist in the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial at John Curtin Gallery (2024), has had solo exhibitions across Western Australia and Victoria, and is collected in the State Collection of Western Australia, Artbank, the City of Joondalup and a number of private collections.
Emma Buswell, Between draft and final intentions, 2024. Wool, cotton and acrylic yarn, 165 × 260 × 5 cm. Courtesy: Ava Gallery, Boorloo/Perth.
What is most striking about Buswell’s work is her ability to synthesise cultural events amongst the day-to-day, and highlight their absurdity. For instance, her beaded handbag that mimics a roast chook from Coles, affectionately referred to as the bachelor’s handbag, and her limited edition run of jumpers featuring Mark McGowan’s comment that “There’s nothing unlawful about going for a run and eating a kebab” during a press conference at the height of COVID—these humorous works reflect iconic cultural moments while juxtaposing them with their methods of production. The toil and labour of their making, featuring intricate embroidery and handcraft textiles, encourage viewers to take stock of power and culture in Australia.
Emma Buswell, The Pool, 2024. Wool, cotton and yarn. People’s Choice Award in the 2025 Ramsay Art Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Courtesy: Ava Gallery, Boorloo/Perth.
Buswell’s more recent work is informed by matrilineal handcraft and knitting techniques and she has produced large-scaled knitted tapestries made with her Singer Memo-matic 321—a knitting machine popular in the 1960s associated with domestic hobby craft and textiles. With this tool she’s become more focused on representations of women’s labour and art history and exploring contemporary anxieties around class, politics and echo chambers. Her large-scale work The Pool consists of two tapestries that refer to Narcissus and Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Buswell draws connections to contemporary dilemmas around narcissism in politics and the echo chambers that emerge in online media platforms. Buswell is one to watch out for as a millennial keen to synthesise contemporary culture while experimenting with form.
First published in Art Collector issue #115 (January–March 2026).
