Pushing the limits of figuration and abstraction and of fiction and fantasy in our relationship to nature, British-American artist Emma Webster has embarked on an aesthetic, philosophical and spiritual examination of contemporary perceptions of landscape, navigating the slippery terrain between sensorial reality and digital manipulation. She debuted new works during Art Basel Hong Kong at Perrotin inspired by the desolate, arid landscapes of Pacific Palisades, which endured a record-breaking dry season last year. That extreme weather ultimately fueled the wildfires in Los Angeles, devastating a fragile ecosystem and destroying her family’s home.
Characterized by a dark haze and gloomy atmosphere, these bleak landscapes appear suspended in a liminal state of unsettling calm—one that both precedes and follows apocalyptic disaster. The agitation roiling within the clouds is echoed in the swirling momentum of Webster’s more abstract gestures, as if anticipating the impetuous eruption of catastrophic forces.
As Webster demonstrated with her iPad during our walkthrough, most of her paintings begin as digital studies of simulated environments—worlds she constructs through digital renderings in virtual reality and occasionally translates into physical matter using 3D printing. She tends to use technology “in a perverse way,” first creating a sculpture and then scanning it back into a virtual form. The result is a recursive illusion of gravity, light and reality, as if this fictional simulacrum of nature could manifest sensorial presence.
Seduced by material decisions, Webster admits to finding delight in the rendering of the light and textures that define this world-making process—one that becomes a perfect platform with which to attempt to understand and translate the mystery of nature and its inexhaustible forces. Wrestling with the dialectical tension between embodiment and disembodiment, her representation of nature deliberately exceeds the boundaries of both tangible reality and the mind’s invention. It moves beyond the logic of sensation and the science of matter, becoming both image and symbol.
Webster’s innovative use of VR, in particular, has allowed her to go further in terms of dimension, perception and immersion within the image and its experience. As she explains, working with the technology lets her manipulate light and texture freely, generating potentially infinite morphing possibilities of the same entity. “It activates a puzzle mentality,” she said.
As French philosopher Gilles Deleuze suggested, there are two ways to overcome figuration—understood as both the illustrative and the narrative. One path moves toward abstraction; the other veers toward the “figure,” conceived as a single nuclear entity that fuses sensitive form with emotional and psychical experience. In Webster’s case, the result is an intentional, profoundly artificial reproduction of natural form that blurs the lines between plein-air landscape, still-life and some digital reality. Her fictitious environments, meticulously designed and staged, have never existed in life, yet they seem to possess an embedded psychological and spiritual charge animated by her abstract painterly gestures.
Notably, as the depictions of nature become less and less real in their flattened 2D representation, the works themselves begin to provocatively confront our impulse to appropriate, objectify, instrumentalize and anthropomorphize the natural world. “They’re scary because they’re ominous,” Webster told Observer. That raises the question: what exactly are we afraid of?
Yet the next phase of Webster’s process pulls these images back into the sensorial realm, into the soft, tactile matter of oil painting. She acknowledges that it becomes essential for her to carefully choreograph the light and construct a theatrical mise-en-scène—one that amplifies the drama while drawing the viewer deeper into the visual terrain.
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On the canvas, however, spatial and volumetric cues collapse onto a single plane in an approach to landscape more aligned with Eastern pictorial traditions. Techniques like backlighting and underlighting—borrowed respectively from the vocabularies of camera and theatre—are strategies Webster adopts to sustain the illusion of a space that feels fictitious yet strangely probable. “They have a realistic light, a realistic appearance, but they’re not part of this world,” she said.
What emerges are densely layered canvases that grapple with the ecological crisis born of humanity’s lopsided relationship with nature. For Webster, the complexity of the image is not only inevitable—it’s required to address the complexity of all things. From building shoebox dioramas to constructing full-scale VR worlds, she has come to see that complication is integral to understanding. “I questioned how we make sense of the space and realized that it’s about having this sense of muchness, complexity and stratification,” she explained.
Functioning as dystopic counterpoints to classical idylls, these ominous landscapes foresee a future for nature already marred by disconnection and degradation. Webster’s paintings insist that environmental catastrophe is not impending—it’s already here. The “vapor” of disaster hovers with ghostly persistence above these desolate terrains, already stripped of vitality, already adrift without gravity.
At the same time, Webster engages in a continuous shift of scale, a deliberate strategy that forces the viewer to reorient—or at least question—the point of view we adopt in our contemplation and conception of nature. Even the birds and animals she introduces as characters in these scenes are pure inventions: entirely new species conjured without reference. As we moved from painting to painting, she confessed that she didn’t even allow herself to google the real thing before painting these uncanny forms. They’re intentionally static, artificially disproportioned—awkward constructs, a kind of nature already rendered as distorted artifice. As she explains, painting offers a space where species can exist without being subject to survival or adaptation, which are always tethered to functionality and logic.
It is precisely the virtuosity and virtuality of these images that hold them in suspension, caught between earthbound, celestial and aquatic dimensions. Subtle manipulations of light, scale and sensorial perception fracture the logic of realism, crafting instead a more theatrical world—one that stages a mysterious, near-mystic return to our primordial relationship with nature. The inexplicability of this constructed environment invites a renewed sense of reverence, a form of veneration that modernity has all but lost.
In this sense, Webster’s work carries the same gravitational pull toward the sublime as defined by Romanticism—an intricate weave of terror and awe that compels us to confront our own insignificance, our powerlessness in the face of nature’s inexorable forces. And yet, it also gestures toward a kind of spiritual elevation, a call to attune ourselves more deeply to the unceasing flow of those same energies. Her landscapes become part of an alchemical cycle—of creation and destruction—in which we are not separate but already embedded.
Webster’s goal is not simply to create but to channel images—visions that both warn of possible futures should we fail to shift our paradigm and reveal reality’s inherently fluid, shapeshifting nature. “The paintings offer something solid, but the world is continuously shifting.”
While her works begin with a deliberate, carefully composed rendering of reality, she eventually surrenders to the unpredictable logic of image-making, leaving room for intuition and accident to intervene—moments that can catalyze sudden, transformative epiphanies. “There are a lot of really loose decisions that happen when I’m making the painting itself,” she added. “I mean, there’s mistakes that happen, there’s good things that happen. All this improvisation and intuition allow sudden revelations as images manifest in the process.”
It’s no surprise, then, that a spiritual dimension to the work inevitably surfaces as the artist discusses the unseen forces animating her process. “I think painting is a spiritual act. You don’t know what is coming out until the end. You have to surrender to it. It’s a bit of divination.”
It’s precisely this attitude that lends her images their quiet universality. They become visual expressions of the eternal human impulse to approach the mysteries of nature—to reach toward something deeper in our relationship with the world around us, our place within it and the transitory, ever-shifting essence of all things. “I learned to take a step back and acknowledge that it’s not about me,” Webster said. “It’s about something else, a collective unconscious or some universal force.”
For Webster, the act of creation is itself a form of spiritualism. “Coming from a very scientific family, it has been funny to discover that I can play with that,” she said, reflecting that this idea of “playing God”—the imaginative exercise of world-building through painting—is not about mimicking reality. It’s closer to the gesture of cave paintings: a ritualistic, symbolic practice meant to conjure and access a magical, vital dimension of existence that lies beyond the reach of human logic and linear time.
In Webster’s practice, the integration of new technologies paradoxically allows for a return to something ancient and elemental—a primordial connection with the cyclical forces of nature. Consciously surrendering to the process of the unconscious, she engages in a universal existential and spiritual inquiry: a confrontation with what Martin Heidegger called thrownness. As he described it, humans are “thrown” into existence without consent and must navigate meaning and authenticity from within that condition, reconciling the inborn germ of wholeness with the external, often uncontrollable, movements of fate.
Emma Webster’s “Vapors” is on view at Perrotin Hong Kong through May 17.
