Emmanuelle Orr is a French printmaker and artist based in London and Paris. She graduated from Panthéon Sorbonne University in Paris in the late 90s with a degree in Visual Arts and then moved to London.
Her practice explores themes of connection and isolation of people from others and their environment. When subjects are present in her prints they are either alone, enjoying moments of intimacy or performing for a never seen crowd, or they are disconnected from others around them, lost in their own private worlds.
Urban scenes take a different look at those themes: the streets are empty, or occupied by anonymous passers-by, lights flashing and enticing them into other worlds.
Her prints show the underbelly and the ordinariness of city life, the discarded spaces people no longer occupy, the missed connections and the solitude that can be found in a crowd.
For her current City lights project, she used photographs she took in Pigalle, Paris’ Red Light district, back in the 90s. She deconstructed the images digitally to focus on their essence, and then used these manipulated images as the bases for a series of vibrant and dark prints. The results show traces of a Paris that no longer is, peeking into its most lurid corners but no longer finding anyone there.
Her prints are based either on her photographs on her original charcoal drawings which are then digitally manipulated and handprinted in London. She loves the physicality of the act of printing, and its endless possibilities – how different mediums can be used to create the original artwork for printing, combining photography, drawings and digital work; and how the printing process itself can take the work in an unexpected direction, and present something simultaneously unique and repeated.

Articles:
www.peopleofprint.com/solo-artist/emmanuelle-orr/
www.peopleofprint.com/solo-artist/emmanuelle-orr-the-poetic-of-printing/