Beautiful Children tells the story of children born into lives filled with poverty, the unseen children who are convenient to forget. This series of unstretched hanging canvases is a visual prelude, an hors d'oeuvre of 19 children's lives. Visually we are not given a lot of information, just a shadow or taste of who they may be and we are then invited to dream of who they could become.
Beautiful Children is Emily Hill's way of saying we notice you, you may be often overlooked but you are beautiful treasures in this world and we want to be a part of painting your world with colour, helping bring the ingredients of hope to your darkened palette.
Emily Hill has explored a range of mixed media in this series continuing to try to find ways of creating subtle yet effective texture in her works by a process of layering. The paintings have as their base a dual landscape amidst which, the children are set. This continuum runs throughout, allowing the works to be read as a series of interlinked canvases. The sky runs with grey, tears for the injustices that allow these children to be in such poverty. The black earth hides their history, the deep callings from forgotten times and ancient ruins of where and from whom these children come. The squares are introduced as in Gustav Klimt's work to give the eye another focus. Here the gold and silver symbolise these children's immense value whereas the green is the hidden value and richness of their land of belonging.
In each work children are depicted as black silhouettes, similar to the approach of Shane Cotton with his insects, portraying here the idea that these ones are commonly just an outline with little or no form. Each canvas identifies the children by name, age and country where they live. This information in many cases is factual and obtained from friends' sponsored children.
In this exhibition Emily Hill has aligned herself with World Vision and the work they are doing amongst the world's poor in child sponsorship and development programs by incorporating details of children that have been helped tremendously by their assistance.
