MFA candidate, artist and art educator located in Chattanooga, TN

Artist Bio — Emily Edwards Bassett

Emily Edwards Bassett is a visual artist, educator, and MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts whose work sits at the intersection of domesticity, feminism, and lived experience. Working across large-scale abstract painting, sculpture, photography, and designed objects, Bassett investigates how cultural expectations—especially those placed on women and mothers —are absorbed into the body and replayed in the home.

Bassett is a tenure-track faculty member in the Graphic Arts Department at Chattanooga State Community College, where she teaches art appreciation, photography, digital media, and visual communication. Her dual position as working artist and educator informs her studio practice: the repetition, planning, and emotional labor embedded in pedagogy echo the durational, layered marks in her paintings and the altered domestic artifacts in her sculptural work.

Raised in the South and currently based in Tennessee, Bassett treats biography not as confession but as material. Through gesture, found language, and re-staged objects, she asks what it means to live inside a culture that romanticizes the very structures that limit it—and how art can make those contradictions visible without losing tenderness.

New work coming soon!