Emma Kate
Emma Kate is an Australian sculptor, ceramic artist, and painter whose practice is grounded in memory, place, and the quiet emotional shifts that shape lived experience. Working across painting and hand-built ceramics, her work explores how landscape, movement, and material can act as vessels for personal and collective narratives.
Emma’s practice is deeply informed by ethnographic and psychogeographic approaches, with walking forming a central methodology in both her research and making. Through slow, attentive movement in landscapes, she gathers observations, sensations, and fragments of place that are translated into gestural paintings and tactile ceramic forms. Her vessels, in particular, carry traces of terrain, passage, and containment, functioning as metaphors for belonging, displacement, and care.
Having lived and worked across Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the Philippines, Emma’s work reflects a transnational sensibility shaped by migration, temporary dwelling, and repeated acts of reorientation. These experiences have fostered an ongoing inquiry into how people relate to land, how meaning is inscribed through movement, and how material practice can respond to environments shaped by history, climate, and human presence.
Emma is currently completing a practice-based PhD in Art and Design, with ceramics as a foundational medium. Her doctoral research investigates walking as a form of embodied knowledge-making and ceramics as a material language through which themes of landscape, colonial legacy, and environmental fragility can be explored. Alongside her research practice, Emma holds a Master of Arts in Art History and a Postgraduate Diploma in Visual Art and LOTE Education, and works within international art education. Across all aspects of her practice, she views making as an act of attention — a way of listening to place and forming connections through material, movement, and time.
Education, Art-Practice, and Teaching Experience
1996-1999: Bachelor of Visual Arts, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), School of Visual Art, Edith Cowan University.
Major: Painting and Drawing
Minor: Photography.
2003-2006: Studies with Washi Ningyo making, Seki, Gifu, Japan and Canberra, Australia.
2004: Co-exhibitor, Nagoya Foreign Arts Exhibition. Nagoya International Center, Nagoya, Japan.
2004: Contributing Artist: Mino Washi Lantern Festival Exhibition, Mino, Gifu, Japan.
2005: Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary), University of Canberra, ACT Australia.
Visual Art and LOTE (Japanese)
2006: Teacher of Japanese, Wanniassa School, Canberra, ACT Australia.
2007-2009: Teacher of Visual Art, IBDP and MYP. Teacher of Design, MYP.
Katoh Gakuen Gyoshu High School, Shizuoka, Japan.
2009-2014: Teacher of Art and Design, Glenwood High School, Fife, Scotland.
2014-2016: Teacher of Visual Art, IBDP and MYP. K. International School Tokyo, Japan.
2010 to current: IBDP Visual Arts examiner, EE examiner, Visual Arts Comparative Study Lead Examiner, EUR category 1 examiner. International Baccalureate Organisation.
2015: MA in Art History, The Open University, UK.
Final Dissertation Topic:
Utilising Gendered Strategies to Expose Socio-Political Issues in Japan: Examining the Photographic Practice of Ishiuchi Miyako.
2017: Journeys and Boundaries exhibition. Design Festa Gallery East, Harajuku, Tokyo, Japan.
2016 to 2021: Teacher of Visual Art, IBDP and MYP, Teacher and Team Leader of TOK. Yokohama International School, Yokohama, Japan.
2018 to current: PhdStudent, Art and Design (Ceramics) Suffolk University (prior Southampton Solent University) UK.
Proposed Title: Internal Pilgrimages:
A Practice-Based Reflection on the Agency of Clay, Walking, and Foreign Shores
A Practice-Based Reflection on the Agency of Clay, Walking, and Foreign Shores
2021 to current: Head of Visual and Performing Arts, Head of Visual Art, British School Manila, Philippines.
