FIVE MINUTES WITH

Five minutes with Emma Fordham

Meet the artist who creates unique abstract work inspired by Hong Kong’s terrain. By Cheyelene Fontanilla

Though Hong Kong has all the usual features of a bustling city – skyscrapers, highways layered on networks of roads and buildings densely crowded together – it’s also home to some beautiful, natural terrain. To Emma Fordham, Hong Kong’s wide range of landscapes is more than just a pretty sight. As an artist that explores different mediums (most recently textile art), it serves as her muse.

Fordham is a Swedish-British artist with a studio in Wong Chuk Hang. Exploring topography, urbanisation and landscape, she has made beautiful tapestries with impressions of Hong Kong. “The tapestries I’ve developed this year are hugely inspired by my immediate local environment. When creating my tapestries I’m not only trying to depict a physical space but also my personal connection to it,” says Fordham, who spends a lot of time walking, sketching and photographing her surroundings, using what she’s gathered along with topography maps to compose her creations. “Through layers of paint, spray paint, applique, machine stitching and hand embroidery I build up the artwork. The end result has a quite abstract and pared down quality, though it takes many hours to create,” she says.

Like any great artist, Fordham finds solace in her mediums, particularly with hand stitching. Though it’s a repetitive process, she finds it meditative. “I combine this with the quicker freehand embroidery on the sewing machine, creating changes in rhythm in both my working methods and in the artwork itself.” Working off the city’s features, the artist, who lives on Lamma island, is very intentional about her methods. “The lines of hills and valleys undulate and flow but get punctuated by the sharp and geometric shapes of highrises and other manmade structures. In other sections, big granite boulders create scatterings of dots and circles, all contributing to great, abstract compositions,” Fordham explains.

When asked what she finds special about Hong Kong’s topography, she spoke about Mount Stenhouse, Lamma island’s tallest peak. “On one hand, there is the rugged landscape of Mount Stenhouse with its granite boulders and crags. Then you look across the water from Lamma to Ap Lei Chau, one of the most densely populated islands in the world. I just love those contrasts,” she admits. “When you translate this into topography lines and maps you get very interesting patterns and shapes to work with.”

One of her tapestries depicts Mount Stenhouse. Though it took over a hundred hours to make, she also spent a lot of time trekking through the landscape herself. “A slow but strong connection to that landscape grew and being able to wander and roam in it gave me great solace this past year.” She embroidered a cloak with the topographical lines of the mountain and the result is something truly unique.

Having done a Fine Art degree in London and trained as an art teacher, Fordham has plenty of technical knowledge but she only decided to commit to being a professional artist a year and a half ago. “I’ve always been making and creating and knew that my art was developing in a direction I was really excited about. I think that engagement and investment of time has paid off and so far I have done well with people showing an interest and commissioning my artwork.” As someone that has taken that leap of faith, she has some words of advice for other burgeoning artists out there. “Trust the process and put in the hours. Look at real art whenever that is possible and pay attention to what is being said and how people are saying it.”