Bio
Emily White Tousley was born in 1998 in Orem, Utah. She studied art at BYU-Hawaii and completed her BFA in art at BYU in Provo, Utah, in 2025. She is licensed to teach art in public school to grades K through 12 and currently teaches at Karl G. Maeser Preparatory Academy. She has been included in various important exhibitions, including “39th Annual Spiritual and Religious Art of Utah,” in the Springville Art Museum, Springville Utah; “Statewide Emerging Artists Annual,” at the Bountiful Davis Art Center, Bountiful, Utah; and “Outgrowth,” participating in the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center, West Valley City, Utah. She was honored with an honorable mention award by Bountiful Davis Art Center as part of “Statewide Emerging Artists Annual,” and the juror’s choice award at the BYU Art Department Annual Student Exhibition in 2023, 2024, and 2025. She currently lives and works in Highland, Utah.
Artist Statement
Influenced by ancient and modern theories of consciousness, my artwork explores metaphysical concepts through material. I examine the intersection of corporeal and incorporeal realms, considering how conscious beings may imbue spaces or objects with meaning and, at times, a sense of supernatural vitality. I work with clay and steel for their pronounced physicality. Transforming an abstract idea into a tangible object allows me to directly observe the relationship between immaterial dimensions and physical experience. Clay, in particular, functions as a metaphor for the human body and a vessel for the soul in many cultures and traditions. In my ceramic works, I intentionally draw from these traditions, approaching consciousness by first embodying it in something physical, like a living person.
Conversely, I use photography, sound, and video because of their more complicated relationship with space and time. A camera can freeze time by capturing all the light waves emitted in a single moment. I wonder what a camera can see that I cannot, and I experiment with photography to coax it into revealing its secrets. Sound is simultaneously physically evident and invisible, and it possesses a unique and direct line to human emotion. In my artwork, sound serves as a conceptual bridge between somatic experience and immaterial reality. Engaging with light and sound enables me to explore universal patterns and laws, which I use to articulate complex truths about the world and my place in it. The convergence of substances as concrete as clay and pseudo-physical processes involving waves and particles is an electric point from which I follow innumerable existential lines of inquiry. Thereby, my artwork combines these different materials to ask age-old metaphysical questions and, at times, approximates the nature of subjective consciousness.
The questions that guide my work include what it means to connect with another human being, why it matters, and how it matters. I employ methods of nondiscriminatory observation, as well as intentional abstraction and manipulation, to examine how human connections exist in a simultaneously objective and subjective state. Abstraction helps me become more in tune with myself and understand the parts of me that may have been taught to quiet due to their complexity and lack of scientific explanation. I want to honor the reality of the pain of heartbreak, the sensation of wonder, and other phenomena experienced only within the confines of the conscious mind. Technology is important in my work because it reveals underlying human objectives, and digital technology functions as a type of pseudo-corporeal space that we regularly inhabit. Ultimately, I am always motivated by a desire to understand what a soul is, how we, as souls, occupy and share space, and traverse lengths of time in ways that modern science cannot momentarily define or describe.