Emily Payne was born in San Francisco and grew up in Mill Valley, California, and Amherst, Massachusetts. Payne moved to San Francisco after college and studied figure drawing and oil painting. Her love of making sculptural things with paper led her to pursue an MFA in printmaking and book arts at San Francisco State University. In the midst of busy, often noisy classrooms, she anchored her concentration with heavy, low-tech but utterly reliable tools like the letterpress, the book press, and a beat-up wooden ceramics table she found abandoned in the corner of the sculpture lab. It became her makeshift studio space.
As an installation artist, Payne works with a variety of materials, including wire, used book parts, graphite, found wood, and metal. She creates bodies of work that explore the interplay between light and shadow, two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional sculptures, and the ways objects and drawings can energize and animate the space around them.
Emily Payne received her M.F.A. in Book Arts and Printmaking from San Francisco State University and her B.A. in Literature and Women's Studies from Oberlin College. She lives and works in Berkeley, California. Her work has been exhibited at the Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, the SFMOMA Artist Gallery in San Francisco, and the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley.
Payne's public art pieces are on permanent display at several locations, including Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center, Stanford Medical Center in Emeryville, Kaiser Hospital in Redwood City, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo Alto, the public libraries in Hayward and Lafayette, Square HQ in San Francisco, and Guild Row in Chicago. Most recently, her work was placed in the residence of the Ambassador to Kuwait through the U.S. Department of State’s Arts in the Embassies Program, where it will be exhibited in Kuwait City through 2023. Payne has participated in two artist residencies—one at the Vermont Studio Center and another at the SIM residency in Reykjavik, Iceland—both of which she found invaluable in developing new ideas. The starting points for her recent bodies of work, including Tending and the Burst series, emerged from the experience of being set loose in an unfamiliar place, discovering new surroundings, and following where her instincts led.