Emily Prince | the artist

Selected works on Saatchi Gallery

The numbers kept coming up in the daily reports. Five here, fourteen there, one day after another. And then the growing figure mounting over a thousand. Peripherally it was ever-present, but still only an abstraction. It was no longer enough to know how many. I needed to see pictures of them, to familiarize myself just a tiny bit more with what was happening far from my warm home…

"…and to answer your other question from yesterday – I am in the midst of catching up with portraits of people who’ve died in October…always just catching up."

Emily Prince is "probably not the person to ask" about the Venice Biennale. Though it’s a leading international showcase for emerging artists — and her inclusion in this year’s exhibition is a singular honor — "there are a lot of gaps in my knowledge of that kind of contemporary art," she confesses, and the Biennale is one of those lacunae…