British-American artist Emma Webster reimagines the landscape tradition by fusing virtual world-building and brushwork, creating unsettling yet eerily beautiful environments that blur the lines between sensorial reality and digital manipulation.
Fusing Virtual World-Building and Brushwork, Emma Webster Reimagines the Landscape Tradition
In ‘Vapors‘ at Perrotin Hong Kong, British-American artist Emma Webster has embarked on an aesthetic, philosophical, and spiritual examination of contemporary perceptions of landscape, navigating the slippery terrain between sensorial reality and digital manipulation.
The Artist’s Process
Characterized by a dark haze and gloomy atmosphere, Webster‘s landscapes appear suspended in a liminal state of unsettling calm—one that both precedes and follows apocalyptic disaster. These bleak environments are depicted through densely layered canvases, which grapple with the ecological crisis born of humanity’s lopsided relationship with nature.
The artist begins her process by creating digital studies of simulated environments using virtual reality and 3D printing techniques. She tends to use technology ‘in a perverse way,’ first creating a sculpture and then scanning it back into a virtual form. This recursive illusion of gravity, light, and reality is echoed in the swirling momentum of Webster‘s more abstract gestures.
Virtual reality (VR) has a history dating back to the 1960s, with the first head-mounted display (HMD) created in 1968.
Since then, VR technology has advanced significantly, with improvements in graphics, resolution, and affordability.
Modern VR systems use high-resolution displays, motion sensors, and spatial audio to create immersive experiences.
VR applications range from gaming and education to healthcare and training.
In recent years, VR has become more accessible, with standalone headsets and cloud-based services making it possible for users to experience VR without expensive hardware.
The Intersection of Embodiment and Disembodiment
Webster‘s innovative use of VR has allowed her to manipulate light and texture freely, generating potentially infinite morphing possibilities of the same entity. As she explains, working with this technology ‘activates a puzzle mentality,’ which enables her to navigate the dialectical tension between embodiment and disembodiment.
Virtual reality (VR) has come a long way since its inception in the 1960s.
Initially used for military and medical purposes, VR technology has expanded to various industries such as gaming, education, and entertainment.
Today, VR headsets are available for consumers, offering immersive experiences with high-resolution graphics and spatial audio.
According to a report by Statista, the global VR market is projected to reach $44.7 billion by 2024, up from $1.2 billion in 2016.
The artist deliberately blurs the boundaries between plein-air landscape, still-life, and digital creations, inventing a wholly new genre that challenges our perceptions of nature. Her fictitious environments, meticulously designed and staged, possess an embedded psychological and spiritual charge animated by her abstract painterly gestures.
The Provocation of Nature
Notably, as the depictions of nature become less and less real in their flattened 2D representation, the works themselves begin to confront our impulse to appropriate, objectify, instrumentalize, and anthropomorphize the natural world. ‘They’re scary because they’re ominous,’ Webster says, raising questions about what exactly we are afraid of.
The Role of Light and Scale
Webster‘s use of light and scale manipulations fractures the logic of realism, crafting a more theatrical world that stages a mysterious return to our primordial relationship with nature. Subtle manipulations of these elements fracture the viewer’s perception, inviting a renewed sense of reverence for the natural world.
The Sublime and the Spiritual
Webster‘s landscapes become part of an alchemical cycle—of creation and destruction—in which we are not separate but already embedded. Her work carries the same gravitational pull toward the sublime as defined by Romanticism, compelling us to confront our own insignificance in the face of nature’s inexorable forces.
The Artist’s Intent
Webster‘s goal is not simply to create but to channel images—visions that both warn of possible futures and reveal reality’s inherently fluid, shapeshifting nature. Her paintings offer something solid, yet the world is continuously shifting. ‘The paintings offer something solid, but the world is continuously shifting.’
In her process, Webster surrenders to the unpredictable logic of image-making, leaving room for intuition and accident to intervene—moments that can catalyze sudden, transformative epiphanies. She describes painting as a spiritual act, where she must surrender to the unknown, embracing the uncertainty and mystery of creation.
The Universal Impulse
Webster‘s work becomes visual expressions of the eternal human impulse to approach the mysteries of nature—to reach toward something deeper in our relationship with the world around us, our place within it, and the transitory, ever-shifting essence of all things. ‘I learned to take a step back and acknowledge that it’s not about me,’ Webster says. ‘It’s about something else, a collective unconscious or some universal force.’
Nature encompasses the physical world around us, including living organisms, landforms, and weather patterns.
It is a complex system that has been shaped by billions of years of evolution.
The natural environment provides essential resources such as air, water, and soil, which support life on Earth.
According to the United Nations, approximately 8.7% of all species have gone extinct in recent centuries due to human activities.
Human impact on nature is a pressing concern, with climate change, deforestation, and pollution being major issues.
In this sense, Webster‘s work paradoxically allows for a return to something ancient and elemental—a primordial connection with the cyclical forces of nature. Consciously surrendering to the process of the unconscious, she engages in a universal existential and spiritual inquiry: a confrontation with what Martin Heidegger called ‘thrownness.’
