Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Printmaking, Photography, Sculpture, Installation, Drawing
Website: emilygui.com
Emily Gui is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Berkeley, California. Born in 1990 in Massachusetts, she received her B.A. in Studio Arts from Bard College in 2012 and her MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley in 2021, where she also earned certificates in New Media, Global Urban Humanities, and Teaching in Higher Education. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley since 2015 and currently teaches printmaking and drawing at UC Berkeley and UC Davis.
Gui’s practice centers on the climate crisis as refracted through the lenses of consumerism and late capitalism. She uses everyday materials—cardboard packaging, synthetic turf, mass-produced goods—to examine the paradoxes and anxieties embedded in contemporary economic life. Her work invites slow, contemplative looking, using familiar objects to make environmental and social critique accessible to a wide audience.
Across her career she has developed a sustained investigation into the American landscape, focusing on water scarcity, drought, fire risk, and the cultural meanings attached to grass—from the suburban lawn as a class marker, to astroturf, to native grasses transformed into fire hazards by drought conditions in the West.
Printmaking is at the core of Gui’s interdisciplinary practice, with processes including screenprint, cyanotype, and papermaking informing her broader engagement with sculpture, photography, and installation. She frequently references the aesthetics of mass production—screen printing’s relationship to industrial reproduction, the disposability of single-use packaging—to underscore arguments about consumerist excess and environmental cost.
Her installations often incorporate found and accumulated everyday objects, wrapping or reprocessing them through hand papermaking to collapse their individual utility into a collective, monolithic form. This material transformation—from legible commodity to abstract mass—serves as both visual metaphor and literal enactment of the cycles of accumulation and waste she critiques. Gui’s work lingers in complexity, balancing levity with anxiety, and resists simple didacticism in favor of layered, open-ended meaning.
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