Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery

Emma Haworth’s art is built upon observation. With meticulous attention she observes the ebb and flow of modern metropolitan life – in the streets, the parks, the squares of London and New York: it is a constantly shifting drama, of moving people and changing light, played out in a great architectural arena.

Haworth disciplines her vision of this teeming stage through long study as well as through sketching and photography. The scene before her is one of extraordinary complexity, a complexity that she readily embraces. Haworth is somehow able to distill both the telling, individual detail – the plastic bag caught in the branches of a winter tree, the Hyde Park sunbather’s slim-line briefcase - and a vital sense of the whole panorama – the quality of light falling through London plane trees or bouncing off New York skyscrapers, the sense of movement in a crowd, the sense of pleasure on a Bank Holiday.

Her chosen scenes are ones where every passing moment, every new viewpoint, offers a fresh combination of people, animals, buildings, cars, light, colours, and trees. People move – on foot, on roller-skates, on bikes; daylight turns to nightfall; winter turns to spring, summer drifts into autumn. And Haworth’s paintings celebrate these changes, sometimes fixing the moment, sometimes recording the change.