Emilia Telese
Emilia Telese’s practice explores how time, human experience and environmental processes leave traces within materials and landscapes. Working across printmaking, installation and performance, she considers all artistic practice as fundamentally time-based, using paper as a surface where history and transformation become materially visible.
Telese works with materials that carry their own histories, including volcanic dust, soil, clothes and personal objects, as well as traditional materials. In Dust Forest, large-scale monotypes made with Icelandic volcanic dust evoke lost birch forests and the environmental consequences of deforestation and glacial erosion. Progressive Decay extends this investigation through fragile printing matrices constructed from discarded materials. Repeated printing progressively destroys each matrix, creating works that register precise moments within processes of erosion, accumulation and transformation.
Born in Italy and descended from generations of Amalfi papermakers, Telese trained at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts and Brighton University; she holds a PhD from Loughborough University.
She has exhibited internationally since 1994. Highlights include the Louvre, the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica, ZKM, the Freud Museum, the Royal Festival Hall, The Royal Society of Printmakers / Bankside Gallery, Leeds Museum and others. She was selected for the WCPF Curated Hang in 2023 and 2025.
Emilia Telese’s practice explores how time, human experience and environmental processes leave traces within materials and landscapes. Working across printmaking, installation and performance, she considers all artistic practice as fundamentally time-based, using paper as a surface where history and transformation become materially visible.
Telese works with materials that carry their own histories, including volcanic dust, soil, clothes and personal objects, as well as traditional materials. In Dust Forest, large-scale monotypes made with Icelandic volcanic dust evoke lost birch forests and the environmental consequences of deforestation and glacial erosion. Progressive Decay extends this investigation through fragile printing matrices constructed from discarded materials. Repeated printing progressively destroys each matrix, creating works that register precise moments within processes of erosion, accumulation and transformation.
Born in Italy and descended from generations of Amalfi papermakers, Telese trained at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts and Brighton University; she holds a PhD from Loughborough University.
She has exhibited internationally since 1994. Highlights include the Louvre, the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica, ZKM, the Freud Museum, the Royal Festival Hall, The Royal Society of Printmakers / Bankside Gallery, Leeds Museum and others. She was selected for the WCPF Curated Hang in 2023 and 2025.
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