A Warm Life Through Butter: Emily Ponsonby
Emily Ponsonby’s latest body of work ‘A Warm Life Through Butter’ deepens the artist’s investigation into human connection, materiality, and the spaces - both literal and emotional - where we gather and reflect. This new series is unmistakably hers: intimate, reflective, quietly powerful.
Ponsonby’s practice is informed by the rhythms of daily life: the hedgerows she walks, the beans ripening in the garden, and conversations shared about love, life, and the land. Her scenes are not populated by protagonists but by threads of relationships - a multitude of stories and ribboned conversations - each painting inviting us to feel as much as see, and to see the extraordinary in everyday.
Raised as a beekeeper’s daughter, the artist started experimenting with beeswax early on. Ponsonby works in layers, building and reducing. Each panel begins with molten wax poured and buffed into a primed wooden surface, followed by countless rounds of mark-making, erasure, and return - using blades, brush ends and fingers to soften and simplify the pictorial surface.
Ponsonby’s palette is instinctive and deeply personal - this series carries a recurring buttery yellow, a quiet register of contentment that emerged without conscious design. “Every painting is a self-portrait in that my conscious and subconscious have worked hand-in-hand to coax it into being.” ‘A Warm Life Through Butter’ reflects Ponsonby’s enduring belief in the power of shared experience. Often adapting her pictorial surface to the point of view of the bystander, the artist invites us to step into the scene as active participants, forging a world where even the viewer - pulling out a chair or picking up a glass - has something to offer.