ARTIST STATEMENT
What if the mundane periphery of our lives can be a site for translation and transformation, a threshold of poetic possibility? I am fascinated by the vast yet intimate, fleeting nature of sunbeams, and the way cracks record time and reveal tension. I document and trace shifting shadows and sunlight, creating drawings and photographs, and sometimes site-specific poems that cast stained-glass-like shadows in thresholds and alleyways. I spend time crouched down close to cracks in paths and parking lots, filling them—sometimes with fallen petals, often with paper pulp. Whether remaining on-site or transformed into sculptures, books, or prints, these gestures suspend moments of transience and vulnerability in physical form.
When casting cracks, I use handformed abaca pulp deliberately: it is delicate yet surprisingly strong, like the human body. Embedding a copper wire as a skeleton allows the paper to lift from the site, keeping the shape of that fracture: a 1:1 map with dirt clinging to the fiber. It folds and unfolds: a vessel of only cracks, a scar that can cast a shadow. I make cyanotypes to record the shadows, rendering them in light, akin to an X-ray. Sometimes I develop the prints further into mixed-media drawings by tracing additional shadow layers, or cutting the shadow shape from a photograph of light on the ground. Throughout the iterations, these forms become metaphors for healing, icons of resilience and tenderness.
ARTIST BIO
Emily Fussner is a visual artist who works site-responsively. Using installation, sculpture, drawing, and photography, she explores questions of fragility and strength, transience and presence, care and possibility. Born with brittle bone condition Osteogenesis Imperfecta, she brings a deeply personal understanding of fracture repair, and resilience to her process.
Fussner has exhibited nationally and abroad, but most extensively throughout Washington, DC, Maryland and Virginia. She has been commissioned to create site-specific installations for MoCA Arlington (2022), Georgetown Glow (2021) and The Foggy Bottom Outdoor Sculpture Biennial (2018). She earned an MFA in Visual Arts from George Mason University (2019), and during that time received a 2018-2019 VMFA Graduate Fellowship award and participated in a 2019 summer residency at GlogauAIR through American University’s MFA Studio Berlin program. Enjoying a variety of arts-related work, she managed large-scale artist and collector events for Washington Project for the Arts for six years, occasionally teaches and curates, and regularly freelance designs publications and exhibition catalogs. Emily is currently in her final year of a long-term artist residency program at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington in Arlington, VA.
CV (PDF)