Emma Woolley is a contemporary portrait painter and art director based in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Her work explores the psychological space between people, where memory, emotion, and imagined inner worlds overlap and collide.

Born in Moseley, Woolley has spent her entire career immersed in the arts. She graduated in Fine Art before later graduating in Graphic Design and Illustration, building a dual practice that moves fluently between painting and visual communication. Alongside her fine art practice, she is Art Director at a creative advertising agency based in Digbeth, Birmingham, working across branding, digital, and campaign-led projects.

Woolley’s painting practice is rooted in portraiture. Her figures are intimate, close-cropped, and psychologically charged, often stripped of environmental context to focus attention on expression, gesture, and emotional presence. The work is less about likeness and more about what lingers, what is felt rather than seen. Themes of connection, distance, grief, love, and quiet tension run through her paintings, informed by personal experience and long-term reflection.

In 2025, Woolley published her first hardback art book, Paint Lingers, marking a significant milestone in her career as a published contemporary painter. The book documents a body of work created during a period of personal loss and creative return, positioning painting as both survival and communication.

Her work has been exhibited across Birmingham and the West Midlands. In 2024, she held a solo exhibition at Nook Gallery, presenting a focused body of portrait work that further established her distinctive visual language. In 2025, she was shortlisted for the Women in Art Prize, including the Paula Rego Painting Prize.

Woolley continues to develop long-form bodies of work that sit between the personal and the universal. Her paintings invite the viewer into moments of pause, intimacy, and emotional recognition, asking what it means to be seen, remembered, and held in another’s gaze.

She lives and works in Birmingham.

Quick Links: emma-woolley.co.uk

I graduated from Newcastle upon Tyne in 1991 with a degree in Fine Art, specialising in printmaking. Later I completed a Post Graduate in Education in 1993 and pursued a career in teaching. 

In 2024, I embarked on my second career as a visual artist. I exhibit widely, with recent London highlights including Cycles at Espacio Gallery and Auto Amor 3 at Terrace Gallery.

The act of being creative is my true muse. It is the hope of discovery that provides both motivation and inspiration. My art is a transformative process where I can develop my own visual language to express thoughts and emotions.

Embracing the Surrealist method of automatic painting, I allow images to surface spontaneously. My landscapes become memories, dreams, alien worlds. They are puzzles to be solved and emotions to be had.

Recent successes have been long listed in the Jackson’s Art Prize 2026, an International artist award by Hearts to Arts and finding a new studio within South Birmingham Studios in Stirchley, Birmingham. 

Quick Links: taraharrisart.co.uk