Martine Emdur: Synergia

The immersive ocean paintings of Martine Emdur are acts of emotional excavation. For over two decades, the Sydney-based artist has cultivated a distinctive practice that sees figures poised between presence and dissolution, probing intimacy, vulnerability, and the weight of being. The recurring perspectives in her work – looking down into water, floating bodies, solitary swimmers – serve as surrogates for interior states and moments of emotional suspension. Largely self-taught, Emdur’s brushwork is layered and alive, capturing both the pulse of human experience and the shimmering light of the sea.

Emdur has always lived by the sea. She speaks of the ocean as an old friend: “It’s always been a big part of my life… I miss it when it’s absent.” The “eternal patterns” on the water’s surface – endlessly warping and weaving light – inform her latest series, ‘Synergia’, which delves into pattern as language. “The thin surface is like a skin covering the whole ocean, a dance of veils, with secret texts in every ripple,” she explains. “It’s a conduit that absorbs surrounding information and translates it into its own perfectly organised language.” Emdur describes an abstract communication system borne by the sun, streaming through the water to trace contours like nature’s own cartographer, emulsifying and transmitting its shimmering intelligence below the surface. “It’s like an ancient text, a hieroglyphic,” she remarks.

Amidst this optical symphony are Emdur’s figures, unaware of the kaleidoscopic net of light inscribing their bodies. Suspended in moments of surrender, these underwater swimmers appear ethereal – haloed by aureate glow as heat and light emanate, scattering to create a supple iridescence. There is something gently uterine here: figures held in an oceanic embrace, vulnerable, embryonic. They are adrift in a space surging with nascence, the water’s surface an amorphous membrane between two worlds. On it and through it, Emdur’s brush balances translucence and opacity, muddy depths and luminous highlights. This play of light is more than visual flourish – it is a conceptual anchor through which human experience, memory, and emotion refract. As surfaces ripple with shifting sunlight, light captures impermanence: bodies dissolve, reflections distort, and the boundary between self and environment grows fluid – moving towards a state of Synergia. 

Emdur’s process is deeply observational and profoundly patient. She spends hours daily watching the ocean and learning its morphology. To create ‘Synergia’, the artist has been honing her photographic skills, capturing compositions above and below the surface of the sea. “I need a particular motion,” she says, describing the hours spent familiarising herself with locales, tides, and temporal nuances. Some works in the series are devoid of figures as Emdur magnifies segments of the sea, conjuring magic within a mundane ripple or a simple swell. The artist takes thousands of photographs, printing and arranging images on her studio floor to find those that move her. Often she knits several images together, creating her own compositions. Though largely working mimetically, Emdur’s painting process is intuitive – sometimes she maps figures with outlines and blocks them in with oil; other times she lays a tonal base and paints the figures on top. Colour is instinctive – opalescent, muddy, electric, raw – serving emotion before representation. Always is a dialogue with light, a luminous tussle between highlights and shadows that traces curves and refracts across surfaces. 

The paintings in ‘Synergia’ are, in Emdur’s words, “an ode to women”, the solitary female subject framed as life-giver, peace-maker, goddess. She paints her swimmers with deep devotion, focusing on the interiority of women’s bodies in space – how it feels to inhabit them rather than how they appear to others. Her painterly restraint allows the works to hold intimacy without confession, where being seen is not a concession but a choice, and looking becomes an act of recognition rather than control. The female gaze here is neither idealising nor apologetic – it is embodied, intimate, felt. Emdur’s layered oils assert agency through a refusal to smooth or resolve, leaning on subtlety and nuance to offset the vast expanse of blue ocean. Light here is compass, its viscous swirls and spectral shafts piercing the endless blue and delineating depth. There is nothing polished or performative; instead Emdur’s subjects are in a constant state of becoming. As they swim, submerge, and surrender to the boundless blue, we look not at them but through them, with them. 

Emdur’s paintings invite the viewer not merely to observe, but to linger within intimacy, to float in our own fragility. In her hands, the physicality of paint on canvas is a trope for immersion itself: for the sensation of being in water and for the shifting psychological textures of reflection and vulnerability.

Elli Walsh