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Huge, ecstatic canvases are just one of the vocations of the musician who joined the art rockers in 2024. As her show Hotwire My Heart opens, she talks terror, awe and teabags
Emma Richardson loves to eavesdrop when people look at her paintings and talk about what they see in them. “They turn into these Rorschach inkblot tests,” she grins. Looking at her works, you do stand back in awe wondering. Is that a nebula, a god or a fleshy, baroque orgy? An explosion, an implosion or an orgasm? Richardson implies all of these and more, her paintbrush chasing in vivid oils the hedonism, desire and breadth of human experience.
This fascination with the transcendent has in part been informed by her other life as a musician, formerly in the garage-rock trio Band of Skulls and currently playing bass and singing in Pixies.
“Teabag in or out?” she asks brightly, her studio flooded with natural light, illuminating her canvases, some two metres tall. We are in the far, ungentrified reaches of east London, where a Dickensian-vibes building with a glazed roof and bathroom tiles of architectural salvage dreams can still serve as affordable studios. It’s a muggy afternoon and some of the works remain bubble-wrapped after returning from Richardson’s home town: Southampton City Art Gallery recently underwent a £2m revamp and she was chosen for its grand reopening exhibition, Levitate Me: Desire, Ecstasy and the Sublime. “They did such an incredible job,” she says. “It was celestial.”
But the paintings won’t sit here long and nor will she: these works are destined for a new show across town, while their creator will soon be touring the US with Pixies. While Richardson’s degree was in painting, she has always made music. She was asked to join Pixies in 2024, having had a few years off performing to concentrate on painting. She left Band of Skulls during the pandemic, five albums in. “That experience of playing live definitely feeds into my work,” she says. “There’s an electricity in that connection between audience and performers, then the danger and fear – no one knows what’s going to happen next.”
This is especially true with Pixies because there is never a set list. The next song is always decided on the spur of the moment by Black Francis, lead singer and guitarist. “It’s a real thrill,” she says, “and the show goes so quickly because of that excitement. There’s an element of extreme focus, but you let loose as well. It’s really freeing.”
So she explores these experiences on canvas, “and other ways human beings choose to transcend. It’s fascinating to me how we choose to do that through dancing and raves and festivals, big sporting events, but also solitary meditation and connecting to ourselves a bit more deeply.”
Sex is a big one: “Those ecstatic peak experiences. I’m fascinated by desire and female sexuality, connection with other human beings, and the sublime in the natural world. We see it these days more and more with climate change and the storms and this uncontrollable nature. It’s the contemporary sublime, terror mixed with awe, but it’s all under this umbrella of ways of transcending.” Equally for some, this may involve “intoxication and psychedelics or it could be reading a book and getting lost in it.”
Richardson has a crate of her favourite books right here, fresh from being displayed alongside her exhibition in Southampton. Many focus on female desire, a subject she’s been doubling down on as she enters midlife at 44. Miranda July’s All Fours from 2024, Nell Dunn’s Talking to Women from 1964: “Lots of psychology of desire.” She mentions Audre Lorde’s Your Silence Will Not Protect You, which contains her famous 1978 essay about “the erotic as an inner, driving force, a life force, rather than the pornographic reading of the erotic. That fascinates me. That inner drive and push in women, trusting what brings you joy and what gives you pleasure. What do you want out of life? It’s important to figure out these things.”
There’s Gillian Anderson’s Want, too, the first of two collections of anonymously submitted sexual fantasies from women around the world. Richardson digs out another from the box. “This is an incredible book, Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti. She put every single line of her diary into a spreadsheet and then ordered them alphabetically, but they link and make patterns. It’s brilliant when you get to I – and I am and I love and I hate. I’m intrigued by how other writers or artists or musicians explore what it is to exist in a female body.”
I spot the catalogue from the British surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun’s 2025 exhibition at Tate Britain, a show that made me feel so seen as a red-blooded woman that I developed a palpable swagger the further I got around it. And a book on Artemisia Gentileschi, “one of the earliest baroque painters”, says Richardson. “She was very sassy and clever about how she painted her self-portrait, using powder pigments and oil.” Part of the power of Richardson’s work is that it’s steeped in the history of art – you can see abstract ghosts of Gentileschi, Rubens and the female surrealists – but takes the discourse somewhere new and peculiar to her.
She’s inspired visually, too, by the Hubble telescope and sci-fi films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. “There’s a stargate sequence where they’re travelling through time. It’s like loads of flashing, colourful lights going past the helmet of the person in the spacecraft and the energy and colour feels like you’re lifting out of your body – that inspired a painting called I Slipped My Body Completely, which is that sensation that you’re hanging in space, this idea of a transitional state almost.” How to capture that statically in paint is the challenge, she says: “Surprising yourself with what comes out and what you can then work into further. It’s like hunting it down.”
When she talks about oil paints her eyes widen like a toddler investigating its first snail after a downpour. “It’s quite alchemic,” she says. “You can layer it, and you can make it glow and sing like no other medium. There’s something about the consistency, colour and depth you can create, the fact it stays wet so you can work into it and blur and smudge and mix.”
With canvases of this scale, she says, the work “envelops you, it’s wider than your vista”. But while on tour, she paints and draws in more portable dimensions, packing acrylic paint, charcoal and watercolour. “I work in hotel rooms and backstage and make small pieces. I need that outlet on tour.”
It has been 13 years, and two other bass players, since Pixies’ revered original bassist, Kim Deal, left. How has it felt taking on her mantle? “It’s huge shoes to fill and I’ve got nothing but respect for her,” says Richardson, “but all I can do is my best – and know they asked me to do it. But my voice does sound different, and I might have a different playing style. I can’t imitate, but respect.”
She plays the songs how they should be played, “but there’s going to be an element of myself in there. I hope that works with the current lineup. They seem happy, so I’m happy. But it’s an incredible position. And the basslines are so cool.” In fact, learning the songs was a revelation, as a longtime fan. “You realise how cleverly structured they are. They’re really tricky. The time signatures are quite different. There are sections you don’t expect cropping up, and not many repeats.” Richardson played on their 2025 album The Night the Zombies Came. “We’re looking to do some more recording, but it’s all very relaxed.”
The new London show is at the Wolf Collective – a commercial gallery within the curator’s Primrose Hill home. It’s called Hotwire My Heart, borrowed from a 1976 song by a band called Crime, later covered by Sonic Youth. “It has a real frenzied garage rock’n’roll sound like the Stooges,” she says. “I heard it back when I was at Wimbledon School of Art, loved it and titled one of my degree show paintings with the name.” Hotwire was also a name she used when she played solo gigs around Southampton when she was starting out. It feels apt, she says, to reuse the title for these paintings crystallising “the need to be whipped up into another realm”.
Emma Richardson Hotwire My Heart is showing at the Wolf Collective, Primrose Hill, London, until 28 February. Admission is free. For further information on Emma’s work please visit www.emmarichardsonart.com