Emily Filler Canada, b. 1982
“The worst thing is a blank canvas – cover it with anything really and something will start to happen.” - Emily Filler
Emily Filler (b. 1982) is a Canadian artist whose “painterly collages” merge painting, printmaking, and photography into vivid floral and abstract compositions. Drawing on textiles, vintage photographs, and imagery from her father’s garden, her work balances the familiar with the dreamlike, where blooms dissolve into fields of pattern and color. Rather than depicting flowers literally, Filler captures their essence - such as the joy, radiance, and fleeting impressions they leave behind. Her work has been exhibited widely across North America and is held in collections worldwide.
Emily Filler is a Canadian artist whose practice blends painting, printmaking, and photography into what she calls “painterly collages.” Her work draws on personal archives and material fragments - vintage photographs, textiles, and silk-screened imagery - to assemble dreamlike landscapes and imaginative floral compositions. These works hover between recognition and invention, where a familiar bloom dissolves into abstraction and the ordinary gives way to the uncanny. What begins as a collection of disparate parts ultimately resolves into a unified whole.
In her most recent series, Filler juxtaposes fields of vibrant color with intricate patterns and botanical motifs. Layers of dense mark-making play against washes of translucent pigment, while screen-printed flowers—many sourced from photographs of her father’s garden, a place tied to her earliest memories—anchor the work in personal history. The interplay of natural and fabricated elements opens a space where realism and fantasy converge, producing compositions that feel at once grounded and otherworldly.
Throughout, Filler resists a literal depiction of flowers. Instead, she captures their lingering essence such as the joy, radiance, and ephemeral impressions they leave behind. Her work has been widely exhibited across North America and is held in numerous private and corporate collections around the world.