Emilia
Bazan

About the artist

Emilia Bazan completed the King’s Foundation Diploma Year, for which she received a full scholarship (2024 – 25) and is currently reading English Literature at St Catharine’s College Cambridge (2025 – 28).

Emilia predominantly works in oil paint, finding the medium most versatile in its varying degrees of opacity and blendability. She uses pen, pencil and watercolour to sketch on the go and chalk pastels provide an inherent blur which she likes to explore, particularly when drawing from imagery of movement and memory.

The work is figurative as the artist is most consistently drawn to people, their clothes, their movements and their gestures. Interested in working with blur and partial obscurity — anonymity of identity and time as a generative force of both distance and familiarity — she often draws on found imagery from home films of personal archives. The relationship between personal memory and universal experience is a theme to which she often returns. She is drawn to the human tendency to find familiarity and connection in an otherwise anonymous or distant scene, even if we can never fully, personally understand the experience depicted.

Polish dancing and culture is a significant element of the work too. Emilia’s Polish heritage inspires her understanding of embodied movement, and she particularly enjoys working with the vibrancy and intricacy of the costumes. Dancing in the Polish Folk Song and Dance Company Karolinka from the age of 5, has cultivated an appreciation of textual and material detail as well as an intrinsic familiarity with gesture and movement which translates to her other work.