Araújo, Emily

Statement
Los Angeles area artist Emily Araújo’s work of the past three decades has focused on drawing and installation practices. Her work ranges in scale and materials-- from beadwork on snapshots to large scale window and wall drawings.

Since elementary school, when she first learned of it, Araújo has been intrigued by the concept of negative space. Paying attention to negative space when drawing is a technique of visually defining the space around a subject as a way to represent it. As a lover of word play, the term negative space is also a rich conceptual source for Araújo. Negative space is as useful an idea as it is a technique for Araújo and her work features negative space both literally and figuratively. With literal holes: cut, punched, pierced and drawn in her pieces, it is the areas of emptiness--what is missing or removed-- that are the subject, or focal point, of Araújo's work.

Biography
Emily Araújo was born in New York and lived in Hong Kong and Switzerland as a girl. Her Brazilian grandparents lived in New York; her American grandparents lived in Spain. As a young girl, traveling between continents didn't seem unusual to Emily. At age 9, her family returned to the US and Emily finished high school in Connecticut. A somewhat restless spirit, from the ages of 17 to 34 Emily lived and worked in: Rhode Island, Florida, Oregon, Montreal, Northern California, Pennsylvania and Ohio. In 2005, she moved to Southern California-- starting in Los Angeles, then, after a 6-month residency in Rapperswil, Switzerland, she moved to Pasadena in 2007. Finally, in 2014, she and her husband found a home in Altadena, CA. Her children are California kids, born and bred. Perhaps her roots have found the right soil.

Araújo has a certificate in Textile and Surface Design from Otis College of Art and Design (2013), an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2001) and a BFA in printmaking from California College of the Arts (1995). Emily Araújo has worked as an administrator with the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech since 2010 and has been the graphics editor for The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volumes 14, 15, and 16. 

Website
Emily Araújo: https://emily-araujo.com/home.html