Bio
Emily Gray is a Providence, RI-based artist and curator working in painting, printmaking, textiles, sculpture, and performance. Her work explores themes of care, identity, and transformation through personal mythology, spiritual symbolism, and familial lineage. She earned her BA in English and History of Art from Wheaton College, MA, in 2022. Gray is a recipient of the 2022 Rhode Island Foundation’s Michael P. Metcalf Memorial Fund which allowed her to conduct interviews with contemporary artists in Ireland on intersections of gender, religion/spirituality, and nature in their work and create her own work inspired by her travels. In 2023, she was selected for the year-long WaterFire Accelerate fellowship. In her role as the Exhibitions and Art Center Coordinator at WaterFire Providence from 2021-2025, she was a curator and arts administrator, focusing on community arts programming and exhibitions at the WaterFire Arts Center. She is currently a Master of Fine Art candidate, with a concentration of Museum Studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Art at Tufts University, MA.
Artist Statement
My work in painting, sculpture, installation, printmaking, and performance is informed by my Protestant and Catholic roots, exploring my relationship with the natural and spiritual world and as well as my familial lineage. Inspired by the sacred act of braiding hair, the cyclical care of teeth, the nurturing symbolism of shells as homes and wombs, and the sacred heart, to name a few, my practice is a way for me to articulate my own mythic iconography.
To create my work, I still myself and listen to the stories my body whispers, both experienced and inherited. I reflect on the ways I cradle myself - being in water, being creative, movement, and tending to my relationships. I seek to collapse the boundaries between the maiden, mother, and crone archetypes; the stages of my life and the lives of my foremothers are woven into the fabric of my being, stacked like a Russian doll.
My work stands as a meditation on the sanctity of being held and the rhythms that connect us to our origins. Questions I consider in my practice are: “what makes something sacred?”, “how do we honor what we hold dear?”, and “how do the lives of our ancestors live through us?”