Artist Profile

Emma-Louise Grady is a Scottish painter whose work explores intuitive mark-making through intricate patterns, layered colour, and rhythmic abstraction. Inspired by her surroundings and guided by a highly intuitive process, she creates densely detailed compositions that balance freedom and structure, drawing viewers into immersive fields of dots, lines, and undulating forms. Working with a deliberately limited palette, Grady builds complex surfaces through successive layers of paint, generating a remarkable sense of depth, movement, and luminosity. Her paintings evoke associations with natural, microscopic, and celestial worlds while remaining rooted in the physical act of mark-making. Since graduating with a BA (Hons) Fine Art from the University of Dundee in 2019, Grady has established herself as a distinctive voice in contemporary Scottish painting, exhibiting widely across the UK. She was awarded the John Kinross Scholarship in 2019, the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation Award at the Royal Scottish Academy's New Contemporaries exhibition in 2020, and the Scottish Artists’ Benevolent Association Award at the RSA Annual Exhibition in 2023.