EMILY FILLER: Alternative Arrangements

Flowers act as a departure point to a world that dissolves into abstraction. Like a collage, her work is pieced together from things she has seen, things that linger in her mind. Filler is a collector of images - patterns from fabrics, images from books, magazines, her environment, and photographs she takes incessantly. Yet the finished works do not appear as a collage - rather, she has gathered these fragments and made them into a complete image, something whole.

"I would say that colour is one of the things that excites me most. I'm constantly observing my surroundings for interesting combinations. It's not uncommon for me to stop people on the street to take pictures of their clothing if I like the patterns or colours. For a while on my route to the studio there were these two old cars that often parked next to each other on the street and the colour combination was so great I still think about it. I get very excited about colour combinations. I don't think there's such a thing as an ugly or off-putting colour. You can take a colour or combination of colours that isn't so great and then just add one more colour and suddenly it becomes magical. I love that so much. My work is often very colourful. It's not something I plan in advance, it's sort of instinctual. I also don't make use of much formal colour theory, I tend to mix colours intuitively and make decisions pretty quickly."