Emma Watermeyer

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ARTIST CATALOGUE

Hiding in Plain Sight

Hiding in Plain Sight explores the residue of childhood emotional trauma through material, repetition, and the pursuit of a surface that both conceals and reveals. Across these works, the medium of charcoal becomes a language for what resists articulation, a way of translating the unseen into form. Each piece emerges from a slow, bodily process: layering, rubbing, dissolving, and rebuilding. What remains are blackened planes that absorb light almost completely, where gestures become traces, and visibility gives way to presence felt more than seen. 

The use of my own charcoal solution and loose dust is an act of both control and surrender. The material’s unpredictability; its tendency to smear, to cling, to darken beyond measure, mirrors the instability of early emotional experience. These works do not seek to represent specific memories but to recreate the psychological atmosphere they left behind: a space of vigilance, fear, and quiet endurance. In the dense opacity of black, I search for a surface that holds contradiction; stillness and violence, concealment and exposure, silence and sound. Cathy Caruth’s writing on trauma as an unassimilated experience, one that returns belatedly, through repetition rather than recollection, forms a crucial theoretical backdrop to this body of work. 

The process of working and reworking each surface becomes an analogue to trauma’s structure: what cannot be fully known at first insists on reappearing, materially and emotionally. The works exist at the intersection of trauma studies and materiality, where form itself becomes a means of witnessing. In each layer of charcoal and each act of erasure, there is both an attempt to speak and an acknowledgment of the impossibility of complete expression. The physicality of the materials carries the weight of this repetition. Surfaces are rubbed until they yield a soft sheen, only to be covered again; cement bases are chipped to expose fragility beneath solidity; glass panes are blackened and scarred, as if excavated from ruins. Dust settles into every crevice, marking both presence and decay. 

These processes of covering and uncovering mimic the psychic labour of navigating memory, the ways in which trauma hides itself within the very act of being seen. Hiding in Plain Sight thus becomes both a title and a condition: the works appear opaque, even mute, yet they hold within them the echo of something unspoken. What the eye cannot penetrate, the body can still feel. Through these dark, absorbing surfaces, I aim to create a space where viewers encounter the tension between concealment and exposure, a space where silence is materialised and the unseen becomes momentarily visible. In this way, the work gestures toward repair, not through restoration, but through acknowledgment: to let the wound remain open, visible, and alive in form.