Emma Woolley is a contemporary portrait painter and art director based in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Her work explores the psychological space between people, where memory, emotion, and imagined inner worlds overlap and collide.

Born in Moseley, Woolley has spent her entire career immersed in the arts. She graduated in Fine Art before later graduating in Graphic Design and Illustration, building a dual practice that moves fluently between painting and visual communication. Alongside her fine art practice, she is Art Director at a creative advertising agency based in Digbeth, Birmingham, working across branding, digital, and campaign-led projects.

Woolley’s painting practice is rooted in portraiture. Her figures are intimate, close-cropped, and psychologically charged, often stripped of environmental context to focus attention on expression, gesture, and emotional presence. The work is less about likeness and more about what lingers, what is felt rather than seen. Themes of connection, distance, grief, love, and quiet tension run through her paintings, informed by personal experience and long-term reflection.

In 2025, Woolley published her first hardback art book, Paint Lingers, marking a significant milestone in her career as a published contemporary painter. The book documents a body of work created during a period of personal loss and creative return, positioning painting as both survival and communication.

Her work has been exhibited across Birmingham and the West Midlands. In 2024, she held a solo exhibition at Nook Gallery, presenting a focused body of portrait work that further established her distinctive visual language. In 2025, she was shortlisted for the Women in Art Prize, including the Paula Rego Painting Prize.

Woolley continues to develop long-form bodies of work that sit between the personal and the universal. Her paintings invite the viewer into moments of pause, intimacy, and emotional recognition, asking what it means to be seen, remembered, and held in another’s gaze.

She lives and works in Birmingham.

Quick Links: emma-woolley.co.uk

Tara Harris is a contemporary British painter whose practice centres on otherworldly landscapes shaped by intuition, memory, and emotion. Rather than depicting specific locations, Harris paints presences instead of places—inner terrains that suggest states of being, felt experiences, and emotional atmospheres. Her work explores the complex and often fragile relationship between humans and the natural world, highlighting nature’s capacity to heal, nurture, and transform.

Born in Birmingham in 1969, Harris studied Fine Art at Bournville College of Art before continuing her studies at Newcastle Polytechnic, specialising in printmaking. This early training continues to inform her practice, particularly in the intricate lines, textures, and layered structures that underpin her painted surfaces. After many years working in education, she returned fully to her studio practice, bringing with her a deep sensitivity to process, reflection, and patience.

Since 2024, Harris has exhibited in group exhibitions, received international awards, and in 2025 presented her first solo exhibition. Her work has been featured in several art publications, reflecting growing recognition of her distinctive visual language.

Harris’s paintings draw on European modernist surrealism alongside influences from traditional Korean art, particularly its quiet harmony, spatial ambiguity, and expressive mark-making. Uncanny forms emerge and recede, inviting viewers to connect through imagination and emotion rather than fixed narratives.

Often working late into the evening, Harris allows imagery to surface intuitively, embracing a dialogue between control and spontaneity. Themes of healing, transformation, and emotional presence flow throughout her practice, with each work offering a contemplative space for reflection and renewal.

Quick Links: taraharrisart.co.uk