24 May 2023

Emily Valentine: feathers, photography and social housing activism

From Nine To Noon, 10:05 am on 24 May 2023

Award-winning Sydney-based artist and activist Emily Valentine uses art to advocate for her passion: decent public housing.

Exhibiting in the style of a real estate agent's hoarding, her photography shows people living in run-down rentals, under the banner Real State Tenancies

Emily has spent years trying to improve social housing, for Sydney's most vulnerable people, renting sub-standard accommodation, including boarding house tenants, some of which, in a horrible parallel, where victims of a fatal arson attack last year in the Sydney suburb of Newtown.

Photography is one of Emily's most recent artistic mediums. She specialises in creating objects and wonderous animals using, or decorated with, bird feathers.

For this, Emily is a two-time World of Wearable Art winner, in the Bizarre Bra category for her Budgerigar Brassierre, and in the Work with the Most WOW Factor category, her Sulphur Crested Frockatoo.