British artist Emily Ponsonby (1990) blew into Dorset four years ago in the middle of storm Eunice. By pure chance she landed in a village of painters, printmakers, sculptors, carpenters and writers. Ponsonby’s practice is informed by these clever hands and curious minds and the rhythms of their daily life: the hedgerows they walk, the kohlrabi ripening in the garden, and conversations shared about love, life, and the land.
Her paintings are breathing surfaces, built for the small rituals of gathering, for the half-said story at a table, for the comfort of hands resting near one another. Each painting inviting us to feel as much as see and to see the extraordinary in every day.
Raised by a hobbyist beekeeper, Ponsonby started experimenting with beeswax early on, combining it with oil pigment to forge luminous sculptural surfaces that pulse with tactile energy. It was whilst studying in Edinburgh, at Leith School of Art, that she began to work figuration into the wax. Each panel begins with molten beeswax poured and buffed into a primed wooden surface, followed by countless rounds of mark-making and erasure using blades, brush ends and fingers to soften and move the paint around.
Instead of prioritising the image that lies on the surface of the canvas, Ponsonby sees the paintings’ foundations with equal importance. Marlene Dumas and Rebecca Salter were influential in this, especially during the two years she lived in South Africa. Working with solvents under such a hot tin roof felt wrong, so encaustic was replaced with watercolour and egg tempera, ground with Capetonian soil, on layers of silk and calico. A different technique but a shared process of erasure and a willingness to let the material do as much talking as the human hand.
Her year at the Royal Drawing School shook up her work yet again, with the realisation that a technically correct painting could actually be rather boring and that loosening up an image, by inhabiting the mindset or textures of the subject, was far more interesting. This led her back to encaustic and deepening her connection with the audience through the laborious technique. As an observer, you feel Ponsonby’s presence, the speed, the softness and the energy of the struggle. Her paintings pulse with a dynamic tension, a constant push and pull between bold gestures and subtle strokes.
Having just finished a solo show ‘A Warm Life Through Butter’ with Gillian Jason Gallery Ponsonby has returned to the wall and is working towards a new solo show, also with GJG, at The London Art Fair in January 2026.
Website – www.emilyponsonby.com
Instagram – @emily.ponsonby