Emanuela Cusin
Visual Artist and Educator
Cameraless Photography · Material Research · Sculpture
Exploring transformation, impermanence, and emotional traces through material processes.
Work
Emanuela Cusin’s practice navigates the tension between permanence and impermanence, structure and chaos, control and surrender. Her works—both artifacts and images—emerge through cameraless photography and material processes shaped by forces of pressure, disintegration, and temporal drift—where slow material change becomes a metaphor for internal shifts.Rooted in a deep engagement with fragility and repair, her work mirrors emotional processes—where breakdown becomes a method of reconstruction. She explores how tactile materials hold pain and possibility, reclaiming discarded or overlooked matter as a way of reconnecting with self, memory, and presence.Alongside her studio practice, Cusin collaborates on projects that explore the intersections of art, social structures, and shared narratives—asking how collective experience can be made visible through material and gesture.
© Emanuela Cusin. All rights reserved.
About
Emanuela Cusin is an interdisciplinary artist based in Cambridge. Her work has been featured in exhibitions, events, and educational initiatives at institutions including the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Tate Modern, Wysing Arts Centre, British Art Show 8, and Firstsite. In 2021, she received a Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) grant from Arts Council England, supporting her exploration of the connections between photochemistry, materiality, and meaning.
As an educator, Cusin has facilitated workshops as part of Wysing Arts Centre’s learning programme, working closely with young people to nurture creativity, experimentation, and collaborative thinking.
Contact
I welcome your message.
Whether you’re reaching out about a project, collaboration, or simply wish to connect, feel free to share your thoughts. I’ll do my best to reply with care and attention.
Thank you
I welcome your message.
Whether you’re reaching out about a project, collaboration, or simply wish to connect, feel free to share your thoughts. I’ll do my best to reply with care and attention.
Photograms
Lumen Prints & Collaged Abstractions
This body of work explores the slow choreography between light, time, and material. I use expired silver gelatin paper as both surface and subject—working without a camera to create abstract compositions that develop through exposure, manipulation, and chance.I work minimally, often returning to the same sheet of paper over days, weeks, or months. The images form through layering different light sources, dodging and burning with simple stencils or hand-cut shapes. Some are exposed only once, others many times, gradually building subtle shifts in tone and form.The paper itself is folded, cut, or collaged—disrupted and reassembled into new constellations. These gestures are quiet but intentional, allowing transformation to emerge slowly, without control over every outcome.These works are not about capturing a fixed moment, but about allowing time, light, and imperfection to shape something that feels both intimate and open—an abstract record of presence, slow change, and renewal.
Breaking Point
Concrete, expansive mortar, time-based sculpture/performance"Breaking Point" consists of a series of cast concrete cubes that gradually fracture and collapse over several hours in front of the audience. The breaking is triggered through the use of expansive mortar, a slow-reacting substance that exerts internal pressure until the structure gives way.Each cube follows its own rhythm of failure—determined by the density, casting process, and unseen tensions within the material. The sculptures perform their own undoing, cracking apart in real time without external force.This work speaks to the quiet drama of inner rupture—the moment before collapse, the sound of slow yielding. It plays with the illusion of solidity, drawing attention to how materials (and perhaps people) hold until they no longer can.Breaking Point is as much about disintegration as it is about presence: a meditation on pressure, endurance, and the inevitability of transformation.
