Emma Lewis Acker is a self-taught artist and end-of-life doula living and working in New York City.

Emma Lewis Acker works in a hybrid form–not quite collage or painting, not quite textile, both and neither. Born to American and New Zealand parents in ‘70s Leeds, UK, she grew up in New Zealand before coming to NYC. Educated as an actress and writer at NYU, Acker began to make visual art in her 40s.

Living in Brooklyn, she experimented with industrial rolls of discarded paper salvaged outside a matzo factory under the JMZ. Patterns and textures embedded from early years in Aotearoa led to her process of chalking lines on fabric and hand sewing painted pieces of torn paper in rows of color and pattern.

Acker’s work is an outgrowth and meditative practice connected to her role as an end-of-life doula, a career that makes more sense in retrospect than she could have foreseen. Arriving in New York as a teenager, she rented a room from an elderly dancer in Greenwich Village. Their relationship grew over 30 years with Acker taking care of her friend at the end of her life.

Acker’s work explores the interdependent nature of life together – a daily embodiment of the mystery inherent in the relationship between the organic and mechanistic; the eternal and everyday; the earthly and the numinous.