Emma Woolley
About
Emma Woolley is a portrait artist and art director based at the Custard Factory in Digbeth, Birmingham. With a background in creative direction and a deep-rooted connection to South Birmingham’s art scene, Emma’s work focuses on intimate, emotionally charged portraits that explore the complexities of presence, vulnerability, and human connection.
Her recent body of work, The Wonder Series, marks a return to painting after a long hiatus following the death of her mother. Rich with longing, softness, and wild expressive energy, these portraits draw from personal memory, childhood films, and flashes of dreamlike intensity. Her subjects often stare into the distance, lost in thought, each brushstroke carrying both tenderness and defiance. The series was exhibited at nook gallery & studios in Kings Heath during August 2025, alongside a limited-run art zine and Giclée prints.
Emma’s practice sits somewhere between painting and storytelling, each face she paints is both real and imagined, familiar and strange. Her work has recently been shortlisted for the Paula Rego Painting Prize as part of the Women in Art Prize 2025, with her painting The Space Between Us #05 gaining recognition for its emotional weight and striking composition.
Alongside her solo practice, Emma is part of the all-female artist collective In Full Flow, and regularly contributes to exhibitions, events, and community projects across Birmingham. She continues to explore themes of intimacy, memory, and identity through her portraiture, using paint to feel, to question, and to stay connected.
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Emma Woolley
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Emma Woolley
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3 questions on inspiration with
Emma Woolley
We're asking artists to choose one notable person, place and object that has inspired them in their journey so far. We're mapping inspiration at a scale never attempted before
Person
The person who has most inspired my work is my mum.She passed away a couple of years ago, and I didn’t paint for a long time after that. It was like the colour drained out of everything for a while. But eventually, it was painting that helped me find my way back to myself. My Wonder Series came out of that time, I think I was trying to be close to her again, in whatever way I could. She was kind, thoughtful, gentle but powerful, and totally intuitive. So much of the softness, strength, and emotion in my portraits comes from her. Even now, when I paint, I feel her there — in the quiet, in the way I look at a face, in the way I hold space for feeling.She wasn’t an artist, but she taught me how to really see people. And that’s everything.
Place
The place that’s most inspired my work is Moseley, where I was born and raised.Growing up there in the 1980s and 90s, it was this wonderfully bohemian, creative, slightly wild corner of Birmingham. The kind of place where you’d bump into artists, poets, musicians, all just going about their day. It wasn’t showy, it was just in the air. My childhood was full of music, creativity, and community. My dad sang in a folk group, and his friends were all playing in bands or painting or writing. There was always someone doing something inspiring.Moseley taught me how to see beauty in character, to notice the magic in the everyday. It gave me this deep love for people, for stories, for expression. That energy has stayed with me and completely shaped the way I work. It was a place full of heart, and I carry that with me every time I paint.
Object
The object that’s most inspired my work is my dad’s old Yamaha FG180 guitar.It’s the guitar he played all throughout my childhood, he was an incredible guitarist and used to sing Paul Simon songs to us, filling the house with music. That sound, that feeling, is stitched into so many memories for me. After he passed, the guitar became even more precious, not just because it was his, but because it holds his presence. It’s beautifully worn, irreplaceable, and completely full of soul.That guitar reminds me where I come from, a home filled with creativity, expression, and emotion. It reminds me to lead with feeling in everything I make. In many ways, I think it’s become a symbol of why I paint at all, to connect, to feel, to remember.
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