Biography
Emily Lane Settles is an emerging artist based in Asheville, North Carolina. She recently graduated summa cum laude from the University of North Carolina at Asheville with a BFA in Painting and a BA in Psychology. Through oil paintings and acrylic monotype processes Settles explores femininity, intimacy, and women's resilience within the context of patriarchal culture. Her work moves between representation and abstraction, functioning as an ongoing exploration of womanhood and the quiet power found in care, vulnerability, and connection.
Settles' work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Manifest Gallery, Blue Mountain Gallery, the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, and as a competitor at ArtFields. In 2025, she presented her solo exhibition, Sister Sin and Spare Rib, at the S. Tucker Cooke Gallery and received two Undergraduate Research & Creative Activity Program grants in support of the project. Research from the exhibition was published in Capstone: The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship and presented at the National Conference of Undergraduate Research. Alongside her studio practice, she is the founder of Art After the Storm, a community arts initiative supporting children's social-emotional well being in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
Artist Statement
At the core of my work is a recursive consideration of experiencing femininity in a patriarchal society. Paintings emerge through a discussion with both the feminine self and a shared network of experiential womanhood. This connectivity functions as a nourishing source of resilience and healing, as well as power and resistance. My initial approach to these ideas cultivated in a body of large scale, figurative oil paintings and representational acrylic monotypes.
At present, I am considering old motifs and how these can be recreated, reorganized, and repurposed within new works. Moving away from strictly representational work, I am exploring a granular focus of intimacy. Found in everyday domestic interiors, with the figure obscured throughout, the works diffuse recognizable moments into near, yet not complete, abstraction.
Collage functions as a starting point for these monotypes that quietly yet urgently highlight the soft magnitude of everyday life. Here I turn ideas of women’s joy slowly inward into my own life, focusing on otherwise overlooked vignettes that inhabit a space between distortion and clarity. Within compelling luminosity and color work emerges a sort of visual poetry that evokes rather than tells. I view this creative practice as an ongoing inquiry into how intimacy, softness, and connection can function as sites of resilience and resistance.
