The work: Emma Dillon Hill, An Act of Balance, 2022. Soft pastel on 100% cotton paper, 35.5 x 25cm. $300.Courtesy: the artist
Above all, Sydney-based artist Emma Dillon Hill works to showcase the materiality of her craft, with her practice located firmly in abstraction in order to focus on colour and texture. Tending towards soft pastels to execute her compositions, her works have a soft, matte finish, with each passage of colour settled gently against its neighbours. An Act of Balance is one of Dillon Hill’s smaller pieces, which iss an assiduous choice for an artist who focuses on colour balance and communication over sheer visual impact. The piece radiates warmth, its forms blending slightly at their edges as if seen through a heat haze, seeming soft to the touch. The artist describes her process as exploratory and intuitive, and here she has applied organic forms one after another directly on to the surface, each in response to the hue of the one before, until a complete image emerges. Brown sits heavy on a ledge of sky blue, both in tune with the long, broad sweeps of orange and sandy beiges. There is a sense of direct connection between artist and artwork, with intuition informing composition, and echoes of the artist’s hand are discernible where earthy reds filter through later layers. An Act of Balance is in essence a conversation between an artist and her practice.