I’ll be honest with you. I don’t usually spend much time looking round for new artists or unusual pieces of artwork. However last year I came across the artist Emma Hack, and instantly fell in love her work.

She uses body art on human bodies and blends them into detailed backgrounds to create intricate and fascinating photographs. Through a lot of dedication and hard work her career has developed from children’s face painting to makeup artist to a body illustrator.

From camouflage to wallpaper

Hack began her career exploring camouflage and drew her inspiration from the model Verushka, who in the 60’s and 70’s painted herself into rustic walls and other naturalistic settings. Hack then discovered the detailed wallpaper designs of Florence Broadhurst and gained even more inspiration for her art.

Hack paints her models to blend in with complex patterned wallpaper, so they literally disappear into the wall. Other pieces of her work consist of matching the walls pattern and creating an effect that even the best Photoshop expert would struggle to achieve! Hack has won multiple awards for her work, most recently the Renault New Generation Art Award.

19 hours covering naked women in paint

Hack meticulously dedicates up to 19 hours copying the design from the wallpaper and covering the naked women. Her models then stand against the surface to create a striking 3D ‘human wallpaper’ effect. She then paints the patterns onto her models by hand until they seamlessly blend into the background.

Hack: “The (wallpaper paintings) are a very painful experience. They take between eight and 15 hours to create and the model is literally standing in front of the wallpaper the whole time”.

The element that I love most about her paintings is the fact that you have to look at them twice to work out where the body sits in relation to the painting as it isn’t always instantly obvious. There are plenty of other artists who work with body art and camouflage, but for me Emma Hack is the best! Check her out and I reckon the extraordinary images she constructs will leave a lasting impression on you too.

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