Emotion Creatures by Emily Lloyd

In Emotion Creatures, emotions take on shape, texture, and movement. Each animated creature in this exhibition is born from the artist's deep introspection—translating the visceral experience of feeling into imaginative, physical forms.

What does anxiety look like? Is joy feathered and airborne? Does grief have claws? By asking these questions, the artist transforms internal sensations into fantastical beings—some scaly, some soft, others floating, leaping, or slithering.

Through animation, these emotion-creatures come alive, each expressing a unique inner world. Together, they form a moving bestiary of the emotional landscape—one that invites audiences to reflect on the complexity, weight, and wonder of their own feelings.

Emily is a queer Wiradjuri artist living on Awabakal Country. Originally trained as a painter, they began expressing stories through symbolic dot paintings, but after completing a Bachelor of Creative Practice, their artistic journey expanded to include printmaking, illustration, and animation. Art has always held a vital place in their life — they first picked up a paintbrush at the age of twelve and never put it down. Growing up with mental illness, creating was a lifeline, and following a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder in adulthood, art became a powerful way to understand and express their inner world. Emily’s work is rooted in healing and storytelling, whether drawing from their own experiences or from others’. Their creative process involves deconstructing individual emotions, imagining their textures, traits, and physicality to better understand and embody them. This led to the creation of unique emotional “creatures,” each representing the sensations of a specific feeling. In their current body of work, Emotion Creatures, Emily has expanded beyond their own inner landscape to include the voices of others — transforming interviews into new animated beings and environments that explore how emotion lives in the body, heart, and mind.