Emma Burleigh
Emma Burleigh is an artist, writer, illustrator and comics creator based in Stroud, Gloucestershire, with links to Bristol and South Devon. Her work tends to explore the meeting place between image, story, mindfulness, nature and the inner life.
Emma’s long-form graphic novel, My Other Mother, is a watercolour memoir based on her complicated reunion with the mother who relinquished her for adoption as a baby. Intimate, psychologically searching and visually lyrical, the book explores secrecy, identity, maternal absence, reunion, fantasy, trauma and the long afterlife of adoption. It asks what happens when the story a person has been given about their origins begins to crumble, and when one person's need for truth collides with another person’s need for silence. The project won the Laydeez do Comics Women’s Prize for an Unpublished Graphic Novel in Progress in 2018 and received praise for its candour, emotional intensity and haunting artwork.
Emma is also the author and illustrator of two illustrated art-course books, Soul Color and Earth Color, published by Liminal 11 in the UK and Union Square & Co. in the USA and Canada. In addition to her own books, Emma has illustrated works of prose and poetry for The Poetry Business and Windhorse Publications, created self-published zines and comics, painted large-scale works, and contributed creatively to various national organisations, publications and Arts Council-funded community projects.
Emma’s wider creative practice includes teaching, mentoring and supporting emerging artists and comics creators. She has tutored at the Royal West of England Academy Drawing School since 2017, works as a professional mentor for LDComics, and was a long-serving member of the LDComics core team, championing emerging comics creators through talks and events.
Emma is interested in the power of comics, and of images in general, to give form to difficult personal experience: to hold what is fragmented, unsaid, buried or hidden, and to make it visible without simplifying it.