I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which I live and practice—the lands of the Yugarabul, Yuggera, Jagera, and Turrbal peoples — and pay respect to Elders—past, present, and emerging—and acknowledge the important role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to play within my community.

Emma Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist based in Meanjin/Brisbane. Her practice explores self-portraiture through reworked textiles, drawing, printmaking, and embroidery, engaging with pagan iconography, folklore, and ritual through a decolonial lens. Gardner’s materially driven works interrogate Western mythologies and their entanglements with power, place, and identity, often incorporating textile repair, seasonal gestures, and kinetic installation as modes of embodied critique.

Through her practice, Gardner seeks to unsettle inherited narratives and reimagine symbolic traditions with ethical and site-responsive methodologies, offering a reflective lens on mythic embodiment, cultural accountability, and the politics of repair.