Emma FitzGerlad

Spring ~ 2024

Shown here in PAVIA as framed photos (photo credit Erika Harrsch) Border Crossing is a durational drawing completed in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I wrote the word “wall” in red/brown ink on the Santa Fe Art Institute Gallery wall for 12 hours from 7am until 7pm, in March 2016. The repetition of the word takes on new meaning as it becomes a landscape with a depth, and suggests both blood and earth. The work was completed during a thematic residency at SFAI on the theme of migration, with other participants from North and South America, including El Salvador and Mexico. It was a time of deep learning of the challenges faced by migrants as they traversed the two continents, and what they faced once they reached the US, often ending up in detention centres, with families separated. My time at PAVIA was spent further exploring this concept.

Emma Fitzgerald

Emma FitzGerald was born to Irish parents in Lesotho, a small mountainous kingdom in Southern Africa. She moved to Canada at a young age and spent most of her childhood in Vancouver, BC. These early travels have instilled in her a keen interest in people and places.

Emma has followed a career path that is part architecture, part art, receiving a BFA in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia in 2004, and a Masters in Architecture from Dalhousie University in 2008. She has worked in architecture offices across Canada and with Peter Rich Architects in Johannesburg, South Africa. There she worked on the award winning Mapangubwe Interpretive Centre and Alexandra Heritage Centre.

Her art practice is characterised by on-site drawing, place-based research, and a sense of the poetic. This work has taken her from textile factories in her birth country of Lesotho, to the various houses of Canadian American poet Elizabeth Bishop. She has exhibited widely, and participated in several artist residency programmes including Largo das Artes in Rio de Janeiro, and the Santa Fe Art Institute's thematic residency in New Mexico.

She is the author and illustrator of Hand Drawn Halifax, a best-selling book based on her chosen home in Nova Scotia. The Globe & Mail describes it as 'part journal, part sketchbook, Hand Drawn Halifax is a love letter to Atlantic Canada’s largest city.'

Emma has since written and illustrated Sketch by Sketch Along Nova Scotia's South Shore, also with Formac Publishing. She has worked with Nimbus Publishing, illustrating the children's books EveryBody's Different on EveryBody Street (words Sheree Fitch) and A Pocket of Time: The Poetic Childhood of Elizabeth Bishop (words Rita Wilson), was nominated for IBBY Canada's 2020 Cleaver Award.

In Summer 2020 she released Hand Drawn Vancouver with Appetite of Penguin Random House Canada.
Emma is currently at work on Hand Drawn Victoria with a projected publication date of Spring 2024. Her most recent kid's book release is When The Ocean Came to Town written by Sal Sawler, to be published by Nimbus Publishing in October 2023.