Emily Wolfe (b.1972, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau) immerses herself in the traditions and reveries of trompe l’oeil and its charismatic illusory qualities. She draws our attention to the act of image making, simultaneously disrupting and perpetuating the illusion of the image and the nature of its construction as a series of intersecting planes. Time is expertly conflated in these works, collapsing it in on itself as if merely by accident instead of careful artifice. Positioned at the boundary between the painted world and the physical one – at the threshold between dream and reality – Wolfe’s delicate paper trails lead us in ever-increasing circles, continuously looping back on ourselves.

Recent works see Wolfe turning her attention to the history and traditions of 17th and 18th century European landscape painting. After photocopying prints in sections, she cuts and reassembles them as paper collages, with the addition of other materials such as paper and masking tape. She then photographs and discards the collages, only then beginning the process of painting from the photographic image she has made. Art Historian David Maskill considers this “complex layering of references between reproductions and ‘originals’”, and Wolfe’s resulting works as “painted memories of preparation, of excavation, of selection and of assemblage, which are as much records of her thought processes as they are displays of her astonishing painting technique.”