About the artist

Emme Orbach is an Australian, Naarm (Melbourne) born artist currently practicing in Tamaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa. She completed a Bachelor (Hons) in Fine Art at RMIT in 2014. Emme has exhibited at Melbourne Museum, Moreland City Council, City of Greater Dandenong, Stockroom Kyneton, Anita Traverso Gallery, Pitch Music and Arts Festival, Blindside, and Rubicon ARI. In 2020 Emme's work was featured in the ABC Science docuseries Phenomena.

Collabs with Nature

Emme is best known for her crystal series, an ongoing project which began in 2014. The artist designs minimalist aluminium sculptures and submerges them in a chemical solution. This process allows crystals to grow geometric structures upon the substrate. Allowing systems of nature to coexist and collide with her sculptures over time.

At the intersection of Art and Science

“Many artists have written of the sense of working-without-knowing, of making without yet understanding why, of the sense that the artwork and its materials are driving its emergence whilst the artist is merely a means to this self-generation. In embracing such a material as monoammonium phosphate crystals, Orbach explicitly exposes herself, and her artwork, to such a space of not-knowing. 

In this space, where the artist rescinds control, facilitating situations in which she opens up to the chemical's inherent need to generate its own forms, we can begin to visualise and comprehend the ways in which matter plays as much a part in the formation and experience of our world as do we, the humans.” - Dr Laura Woodward’s essay Crystalline Matter

“I don’t replicate nature,

I facilitate it.”

— EMME ORBACH