Emily-Jane Hillman was born in Zimbabwe, to a British mother and Portuguese father, where she won several National Eisteddfod prizes for poetry, writing and illustrations as a young girl. She later received a place at the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg where she studied Fine Art, gaining a distinction in sculpture. Soon afterwards, she moved to London after being scouted by Premier Modeling Agency and later, as a singer by SONY BMG. Emily-Jane, is also a published poet and playwright and won a Jerwood/Arvon prize for her book After the Rains. Her third novel is in the process of being published. She is a student of literature, theology, philosophy, psychoanalysis and art therapies as well as a creativity coach, and has been an advocate of more creativity in schools since her first son began school in 1999. She is currently completing her Big Men’s Boots trilogy and tries to keep up her award winning blog. Emily is married and has 4 children, three of whom she homeschools. Her eldest son is a musician, artist and bit part actor who still lives in London.
After 30 years in London, Emily-Jane returned to her first love and began exhibiting her paintings and sculpture in Wales where she creates art at HAUS Studios in Llandudno. Her oeuvre includes abstracts, figurative works, line drawings, cartoons, sculpture and illustrations, as well as contemporary art, photography, film, and video work. Her work has been sent to art lovers in London, the Netherlands, and North America, and her flowers and other botanical works are sold at botanically.nl in the Netherlands
Emily is inspired by the natural world and in particular the mystical quality of the Welsh landscape. She has been fascinated by mountains, since she gazed at the ‘purple’ mountains of her youth in Zimbabwe and longed to conquer them. She is also interested in mountains as metaphor – overcoming obstacles to success or freedom, for instance. She is terrified of climbing the high peaks but she does, and each time, it is a physical, mental and spiritual act of overcoming. Having overcome much trauma in her life, these mountains, actual and symbolic, metaphorical and meaningful, in pain and in paint, actual and spiritual – meet in her work and are recurring tropes along with the landscapes of imagination and memory. Parallel lines of landscape and memory were most recently seen in her exhibition From Zimbabwe to the Vadre where the landscapes of Europe, Africa and imagination came together as parallel lines – physically and in her mind – along with the freedom she experiences when walking, running or cycling through the landscape she is living in in Wales.
She is also preoccupied with how to explore and represent what she believes are three states of being: the physical; mental and emotional; and the spiritual. When we truly look at something or someone, with compassion, we see truth, which is the aspect of beauty that Emily is intrigued by. Her work is a search for truth and meaning beyond what we see: truth that points to something beyond ourselves, something transcendent, eternal. Her oversized flowers, some in the foreground in black, invite the viewer to look at what is in front of them, to truly look, at the wonder of nature and not to be ‘blurred’ by it, but to look very carefully at the minutiae the particulars of seeing. Her daily drawing practice, is what helps her to truly see, and to feel love and compassion for herself, others and the living, breathing, diverse and exquisite world around her – an endless source of inspiration and wonder.
Given she is a writer as well as an author, her work explores narratives – the narratives we tell ourselves; the narratives we are comforted by and the narratives that begin with an impulse or a trigger – sometimes her work begins with a stirring a sense of something building or a clear symbol or metaphor, but often it is a question, a premise: Why do we live blithely on when we could die at any moment with the meaning of life not settled in our own minds? Why are we so arrogant when we reside in meat? Her installations and sculptures are the vehicles she uses to drive these questions home as do some of her large scale figurative works.
As an activist, Emily finds expression through Green Man, an everyman, a hu-man, as in mankind. Green Man loves people and loves the earth. A universal figure of green, he refreshes young and old alike with his invitation for people to seek a higher path, to love, and not judge, even though he feels pain when people are unkind to one another, or are cruel to the earth. For her, art is transformative, healing, essential. Her hope is that this feeling will translate. Green Man has his own Instagram page