Emilie Heurtevent was born in Paris in 1986 and lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. Heurtevent studied history of art and calligraphy at Sorbonne University, Paris graduating with a Master’s Degree in 2009.
Emilie Heurtevent’s painting-based practice combines an interest in landscape, the sublime and the natural life cycle of decay and renewal, concerns she describes as classical in tone, in terms of their relation to classical creation stories, such as that of Gaia (Mother Earth) in Greek mythology. Water is a recurring motif and her work often takes as its starting point the pictorial possibilities of the changing weather: darkening storms, wild squalls, the angle of driving rain, the vastness of a storm cloud. As in nature, her practice embraces change as essential to growth, a view reinforced by the often primeval restless energy in her sometimes calm sometimes explosive depictions of air, water and earth, elements which, although lifegiving, can also be destructive.
The play of darkness and light within the landscape is of particular interest to Heurtevent, an element she uses to create dramatic, often large-scale chiaroscuro panoramas of abstracted geographies which might evoke, the surge of a river, the accidental poetry of splashing rain, the humbling power of an ancient glacier, the sublime rise and fall of silhouetted mountains, or the more gradual rhythms of silhouetted hills and dales. Heurtevent counters the Romantic connotations of this macro perspective of the landscape through an interest in the microscopic decay of these vast environments; the role of leaf litter in soil fertilisation and forest regeneration, or the transition of water to and from ice.