Emily Devers is a multidisciplinary artist, designer and arts facilitator based in Meanjin (Brisbane), Australia. Her practice explores how encounters with public and private spaces shape our experiences, often in ways we don’t fully recognise. She invites you to take notice of the overlooked, acknowledging the influence of images, urban materials and delineation structures on our experiences. 

Emily’s work is an interplay of realistic details with the freedom of abstraction. It sits somewhere between public art and the traditional, blending contemporary painting, collage and markers of contemporary muralism to create a unique visual language. The use of durational textures, urban debris, safety red and other tactile symbols reference the spaces her work draws from—shaping subtle experiences into something entirely new. 

As a commercial mural artist and brand designer, Emily possesses a nuanced understanding of how images influence perception. However, her art practice diverges from the distillation of graphics, instead opening her up to the freedom of the expansive picture plane. She uses the backgrounds of found images, or the “non-image”, to divide and organise space in her painted compositions. Particularly compelled by the slippage between object and space within an image, she continues investigating these visual thresholds in her artwork.

Emily’s tenure as a public artist and graphic designer spans over 15 years. She has exhibited in Queensland, Victoria, and San Francisco, and she has participated in residencies across Australia, Mexico, Spain, North Africa, and the U.S.A. Her contribution to public art extends to national and international projects. Locally, Emily plays an active role in the creative community as an Arts mentor for Councils and has held teaching positions at Australian design colleges and universities. Emily’s creative practice is a culmination of these experiences, one that is evolving through observation, intuition and experimentation.