Emily Steer

London

Journalist at Freelance

📝Arts journalist and editor 🧠Currently studying Psychodynamic Psychotherapy MA 🐘Previously @elephantmag, AW22 out now

Articles

Is It Furniture or Fine Art? How Artists Are Rethinking Everyday Design

2 days ago | news.artnet.com | Emily Steer

Physical contact with art is rarely encouraged by galleries. The use of furniture within modern and contemporary art has often played with this rule, offering—but not always providing—the tantalizing promise of touch or rest. Readable as both art object and design commodity, artist-designer furniture blurs the boundary between these two often distinct categories.
How Nan Goldin, Mike Kelley and Félix González-Torres Explore Ideas of Home

6 days ago | anothermag.com | Emily Steer

A new group exhibition at Anonymous Gallery in New York explores the underlying conflicts of the home as a place of both tranquility and turmoil The home is often viewed as a place of comfort, but it can also be a source of tension and confinement. A new group show at Anonymous Gallery in New York explores the underlying conflicts of the home as a place of both tranquility and turmoil, through the work of iconic artists such as Félix González-Torres,Nan Goldin, and Mike Kelley.
'Even My Most Polite Work Turns Out Deeply Fucked Up'

1 week ago | ocula.com | Emily Steer

Marianna Simnett's work is complicated. Across video, performance, painting, sculpture, and more, she draws out the messy, conflicted emotions that we tend to suppress. Inspired by ancient myths and fairy tales, as well as by cutting-edge technology, Simnett's pieces careen between sadism and humour. When I ask the artist about the underlying malice in her work, she laughs: 'I have tried to be less cruel towards my viewer, but even my most polite work turns out deeply fucked up and violent.
Why Do Ho Suh Keeps Remaking His Childhood Home

2 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Emily Steer

Do Ho Suh, whose major survey exhibition in London opens this week, discusses the power of architecture and finding motivation from mistakes. The artist Do Ho Suh's London studio is a mazelike series of spaces within a Victorian warehouse complex in the northern Islington neighborhood. In one room, a wall is covered in monochromatic mesh maquettes of sculptures that resemble his former homes in Seoul, New York and Berlin.
An Introductory Guide to the Work of Sophie Calle

2 weeks ago | anothermag.com | Emily Steer

Mixing photography, writing and film, the French conceptual artist’s humorous, deeply human projects explore her own life and fleeting connections with those around her Sophie Calle straddles photography, literature and psychology, her language keenly attuned to the nuance of human feeling. The French conceptual artist inhabits a unique space in the creative world.
Shadi Al-Atallah Has a Theory About Holes

3 weeks ago | ocula.com | Emily Steer

For Shadi Al-Atallah, a hole is 'a portal to infinite possibility'—whether physical, spiritual, or psychic. Emily Steer met with the Saudi Arabia-born painter in their London studio. Shadi Al-Atallah, rolled up in his right hand (2025). Acrylic, charcoal, ink, and chinagraph pencil. 50 x 50 x 3.5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Niru Ratnam, London. Photo: Studio Damian Griffiths.
Step inside the alternate reality of Jeff Wall's photographs

3 weeks ago | wallpaper.com | Emily Steer

In Jeff Wall’s ‘Insomnia’ (1994), a man lies in a foetal position underneath a spindly kitchen table, his brow drenched in sweat as he stares intensely towards the photographer. ‘Event’ (2021) depicts one man jabbing another’s chest in the hallway of a theatrical building. Both images are included in the Canadian artist’s first survey show in Portugal. ‘Time Stands Still’ at MAAT brings together more than sixty works from the last four decades.
Ed Atkins confronts death at Tate Britain – here’s what it looks like

1 month ago | wallpaper.com | Emily Steer

The artist is semi-present in Ed Atkins’ unnerving new show at Tate Britain (‘Ed Atkins’, 2 April – 25 August 2025). He is represented by digital avatars, his voice providing a surreal, delirious soundtrack. In Piano Work 2 (2023), the British artist’s actual form is recreated using motion capture technology as he plays Jürg Frey’s ‘Klavierstuck 2’, but the most recognisable body belongs to an everyman avatar purchased some years ago for $100, who has been used repeatedly through his videos.
How to Get Into Susan Sontag: An Introductory Guide

1 month ago | anothermag.com | Emily Steer |TextEmily Steer

As her work is celebrated by two German institutions, we offer a five-point guide to the life and work of Susan Sontag, from her pioneering writing on photography, culture and cancer Susan Sontag is one of the most famous cultural theorists of the 20thcentury. While she wrote extensively about the role of art, her view spanned far wider than the creative world itself.
The dark, twisted fairytales of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg come to life in Norway

2 months ago | wallpaper.com | Emily Steer

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg stir up a host of uncomfortable feelings. Inspired by fairytales, dark children’s stories, and the dream world, their stop-motion animations and sculptures feature a cast of eccentric animals and plants. These creatures are at once endearing and unnerving, players within wider explorations of sex, violence, and the subconscious.