Emmanuelle Orr

Emmanuelle Orr is a French printmaker and artist based between London and Paris. She graduated from Panthéon Sorbonne University in Paris in the late 90s with a degree in Visual Arts, and has since moved to London where she practises screen printing.

“I love the versatility of printing: I see the print is an artwork in itself, it is built on source material that can come from a range of mediums” explains the artist. Emmanuelle’s own work incorporates photography, drawings, and digital works. She also enjoys the physicality of the act of printing, the connection with paper and ink, and how the whole body is engaged during the printing process. The printmaker describes; “the printing process itself becomes part of the artwork, as accidents and last minute changes can take the work in unexpected directions, it creates something simultaneously unique and multiple“.

Her practice explores themes of connection and isolation of people from others and their environment. The subjects in her prints are either alone, enjoying moments of intimacy, or performing for a never seen crowd; they are disconnected from others around them, lost in their own private worlds. Urban scenes take a different look at these themes: the streets are empty, or occupied by anonymous passers-by, with lights flashing that entice them into other worlds. Emmanuelle’s prints highlight the underbelly and the ordinariness of city life, the discarded spaces no longer occupied, and the missed connections and solitude that can be found in a crowd.

Emmanuelle’s prints are inspired by the details of every day life: the grace of a gesture, and the lights and colours of a street scene, as well as scenes from the films, music, and books she loves. These scraps of life feed into her drawings or are captured in photographs which she then digitally manipulates, using colour and halftones to form figurative scenes, before being printed by hand in London.

As part of her current project, Emmanuelle is using photographs she took in Pigalle, Paris’ Red Light district, back in the 1990s as the basis for a series of screen prints. Some of these photos focus on close-ups of the neon signs in sex shops, and the blinking words advertising the toys and shows on sale. Others take in a wider view of the shop fronts and street lights, and the hustle and bustle of the streets outside. She deconstructed the images digitally in order to capture their essence, and then produced a series of dark prints with vibrant colours. While this project is ongoing, it will be a finite one, as 30 years on most of these shops and signs are gone, and those that remain have changed with the times. The results therefore show the vivid traces of a Paris that no longer is, and the colourful remains of a dark and vivid past.

www.emmanuelleorr.com
@emmanuelle_orr

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