Hotwire my Heart was the name of one of Emma Richardson’s degree show paintings and the name she used when she first started gigging in her hometown of Southampton: “the title has history for me, and yet it also feels new and alive,” she explains.
Now she’s using the same three words for her upcoming solo exhibition, the phrase becoming even more rooted in Richardson’s journey as both a painter and musician: “I wanted something electric about the title that suggested a spark or urgency, the need to be moved and whisked up into another realm”, she says.
Also the name of a song originally by Crime and later covered by Sonic Youth, which Richardson first heard when she was at Wimbledon School of Art at the beginning of her artistic career, it speaks of desire, ambition and sexuality encapsulating the whirling energy of her paintings.
Things Are Hotting Up, 2025, oil on canvas, 40x30cm, Emma Richardson
Emma Richardson’s works are canvases of varying sizes with contorting, sweeping strokes of oil in Yves Klein blues to pearlescent whites. They are mesmerising, like swelling sunset-stained clouds, and as expansive as the sky. In one, Things Are Hotting Up, a form almost appears and fades into the washes of colour; the torso of a reclining woman, head resting on her outstretched arm, melts into strokes of lilac, pink and red.
Inspired by the drama of Baroque and Renaissance paintings, with their striking contrasts of light and dark and whirlwinds of figures and forms, Richardson creates paintings which are both intimate and expansive. “The way Baroque or Renaissance painters visually describe a mythological story or religious scene in paint shares something with the wrestling and writhing of our internal landscapes, which really appeals to me”, she explains.
Flux, 2025, oil on canvas, 150x120cm, Emma Richardson
Exploring transcendence, eroticism, and the sublime, this new body of work reframes the artist’s practice in a different setting for her recent exhibition at Southampton City Art Gallery.
Hotwire my Heart is on show at The Wolf Collective, a curatorial platform and home gallery dedicated to supporting and celebrating multidisciplinary artists. “I think it will bring a new level of intimacy to the work, and also to the visitors’ experience of the exhibition,” Richardson explains. Presented within the context of a family home, with the textures and rhythms of everyday life surrounding the works, the experience of viewing them can become even more personal.
As both a painter and musician, playing bass guitar for the band the Pixies, Richardson finds inspiration within both creative expressions. “I don’t know if music directly influences my painting, or if my painting affects the way I write music, but I have noticed that the process of creating both can be very similar for me,” she explains, having listened to artists like Self Esteem, Nina Simone, Geese and Rosalia during the creation of this exhibition.
Divine Light, 2025, oil on canvas, 190x240cm, Emma Richardson
Music is one form of inspiration for Richardson, and so are women. “Within this exhibition, the selection of works looks more closely at desire in relation to female sexuality, agency, pleasure and the erotic as an inner, intuitive drive. Drawing from my own experiences, but also inspired by the lineage of women artists, writers and musicians who make work about what it is like to live in a female body, these paintings are an exploration of my own visual language for desire and of how to portray these internal psychological worlds through the visceral and sensual medium of oil paint,” she says.
by Sadie Pitcher
Hotwire My Heart is on show at The Wolf Collection from 10 September 2026 to 10 January 2027.