Emma Varga has focused on the flora and landscape of the many places she has either travelled to or lived over the years. She is continually inspired by the memories of her birthplace in Ada, in the former Yugoslavia, where she would look out her bedroom window at the ever changing vine travelling down the wall, along with the many colours within the fields around her home. As an artist she has spent time in areas of the USA such as Palm Springs and has embraced in her work the vibrancy that such a desert location provides. Her connection with the Sydney coastline where she has lived since coming to Australia is possibly her greatest motivation when creating her art. The unique combination of the sea, sky, land and light where she lives are a continual stimulus and her greatest sense of place.
Emma has connections with colour in a wonderful way and her artworks in glass are an acknowledgment of her understanding of the feelings associated with each one. The emotions that are triggered by those colours is what makes you want to spend time looking further into the artworks and their finer detail.
Emma looks beyond the land and towards the oceans surrounding Australia and the landscape beyond. The Great Barrier Reef and Antarctic are environments she has included in exhibitions, and their strong connection with the colour blue is prominent in a number of artworks.
Emma has an enduring focus on the small details of colour, pattern and repetition that she continues to use in her work. With photographic imagery as her starting point she soon had amassed over 3000 images, that when looked at collectively were focused on the ‘quiet achievers’- hedges, green fences, weeds & blades of grass. She seems inextricably drawn to capturing the underdog… the details that most would overlook in our hectic lives. These details are apparent in her work, as each small segment of glass – stacked and repeated over and over again, is fused to create a unified and solid whole.
Emma has been focused on abstracting nature and turning the elements into pattern, much as nature does. This sense of repetition of pattern is a key element in the glass technique that Emma uses and reflects the enormous amount of foliage that a hedge or bush has. While to the casual observer the hedge may be green, to look more carefully, the viewer starts to see limes, olives, deep greens, yellows and perhaps vivid reds. By singling out the details, Emma allows the viewer to focus on the colours, light and pattern.
