Wax Works by Emma Terray
Emma Terray is a visual artist based in Richmond, Virginia, working in encaustic photography. Her work fuses beeswax, resin, pigment, and altered photographs to explore themes of change, resilience, and memory.
A self-proclaimed recovering marketer, Emma walked away from a career in design and art direction to reinvent herself as a practicing fine artist. In 2018 after Hurricane Michael, she discovered a box in her basement— damaged by flood water and full of old photographs—congealed by melted emulsion. These images were shot in 2000, in various cities in Italy. When she pulled the photos apart, she found magic in what remained— forms and colors often with tiny areas peeking out to reveal the original Roman image. She transfers these altered prints into wax and embellishes with alcohol ink or oil stick, often embedding old negatives or paper fragments that stuck to the originals. The result isn’t about returning to the memories—it’s about honoring how they’ve shifted and how we choose to view ‘damage’.
What she loves most about her work is playing with the fluidity of the wax and observing patterns in smeared paper that mimic nature such as coral, granite, fish scales and tiger stripes—reinforcing a long-standing fascination of the interplay of physics and art.
