Emma Lewis Acker works in a hybrid form—not quite collage or painting, not quite textile. Both and neither. She was born to American and New Zealand parents in 1970s Leeds, UK then grew up in New Zealand before moving to NYC. Educated as an actress and writer at NYU, Acker began to make visual art in her 40s.

Living in Brooklyn, she discovered and salvaged industrial rolls of paper discarded from a matzo factory. Experimenting with designs, shapes and textures embedded from her early years in Aotearoa she developed an artistic process, painting large sheets in rich colors before tearing them to pieces to reassemble them in rows of stitched color and pattern.

Acker’s work is an outgrowth and meditative practice connected to her role as an end-of-life doula, a career that makes more sense in retrospect than she could have foreseen. Arriving in New York as a teenager, she rented a room from an elderly dancer in Greenwich Village. Their relationship grew over 30 years with Acker taking care of her friend at the end of her life.

Acker’s work explores the interdependent nature of life together – a daily embodiment of the mystery inherent in the relationship between the organic and mechanistic; the eternal and everyday; the earthly and the numinous.