Emma Labattaglia is a contemporary artist with a background in Fine Arts painting, having completed her studies in both Melbourne, Australia, and Italy. Her work is deeply rooted in heritage—layered in memory, tradition, and personal history. From a young age, she was captivated by the quiet magic of creation, watching her Opa paint in his backyard studio. Those early memories—of turpentine, thick brushes, and quiet focus—formed her foundational connection to the world of art. His influence remains ever-present in her process, not only as a personal legacy but as a guidepost for how she relates to the act of painting itself. Each brushstroke in her work carries echoes of those moments, connecting personal memory with broader themes of inheritance and belonging.

“Collage plays a central role in my practice,” she explains, “fragments of canvas layered upon canvas, torn edges and overlapping textures building a sense of history within each piece.” These surfaces evolve slowly and intuitively, shaped by repetition, erasure, and reapplication. There’s a physical dialogue between what is revealed and what is hidden—scraping back to uncover earlier decisions, only to bury them again beneath thick impasto. This cyclical process mirrors how memory works: fragmented, sometimes obscured, yet always embedded in the present.

Her practice leans naturally into abstraction, where colour, form, and texture communicate what words often cannot. Thick layers of oil paint move with deliberate weight and urgency, creating tactile surfaces that feel aged, weathered, and emotionally resonant. Beneath these dense fields of colour, delicate pastel lines sometimes flicker to the surface—a fragile counterpoint to the material intensity, like ghostly echoes or ancestral whispers threading through the composition. These quiet details ask the viewer to slow down, to look again.

Recurring throughout her work is the motif of tulips—delicate yet resilient forms that carry symbolic weight. “Tulips, for me, are like carriers of memory,” she says. “Each petal layered like chapters, each bloom a small archive of lineage and transformation.” Through these floral forms, she subtly nods to the feminine, the cyclical nature of life, and the rituals of domesticity passed from one generation to the next.

In her layered canvases, Emma Labattaglia finds beauty in imperfection—the unpolished, the raw, the unpredictable. Her paintings are not fixed narratives but open-ended dialogues, where past and present, personal and universal, tradition and reinvention coexist. They offer viewers not only a visual experience but an emotional one, quietly inviting reflection on the complexities of memory, inheritance, and the invisible threads that shape who we are.