Set against the backdrop of the blissful, chaotic frenzy that is Seattle summer, the Frye Store’s most recent Alcove Artist Emma Kates-Shaw invites visitors to slow down and take pleasure in the simple act of noticing. Their original work Exercise in Letting Go (What We Choose to Hold) is an assemblage of rocks collected over nearly a decade that evokes the feeling of walking in nature and gestures towards the beauty of imbuing everyday objects with meaning that transcends capital value. Emma spoke with Store Assistant Manager Caitlyn Edson for this piece. Read on for more about this incredible local artist and her new work for the Store.
Words by Caitlyn Edson / Images by Rachael Lang
Emma Kates-Shaw (she/they) has been making art for as long as she can remember. Currently based in Seattle, with a dream of eventually becoming bi-coastal, Emma is a visual artist of endless mediums including illustration, film photography, installation, and hand poke tattooing. “I've always been a person that has ten thousand mediums going at once,” she says. “There's no world in which I would not be making art.” They are the owner and co-founder of Chance Magic Studio in Pioneer Square and a passionate beach comber whose artwork, like her commission for the Store Alcove, often explores themes inspired by the natural world.
Originally from Ossining, New York, about forty-five minutes north of New York City, she brings to Seattle a decidedly direct, East Coast temperament that can stand in high contrast to the polite, passive attitude this region is known for. “I was thinking about Hugh Hayden’s piece with the rib cages on the hangers,” they told me when we met recently in the Café, “and how he talks about that piece being about New York and proximity to each other. I felt very emotionally attached to that part of the piece, having just been there and really feeling like I’m from there,” she explained. In this work, hand hewn rib cages hover close to one another, some even fully interlocking, evoking the image of bodies pressed together on a subway train. For Emma, closeness—to people, to nature—is a vital element in her work and life, the boundary lines softly blurring as they seek to cut to the heart of the matter in the cultivation of intimacy.
Around the time of their Alcove installation in early July, Emma was marking another personal milestone: the anniversary of their tattoo career, a path that emerged nine years ago this summer. “Tattooing has always been this really intimate, special thing to me,” says Emma. “It involves a lot of trust, and a lot of care,” she explains, “I've always been really interested in the exchange between myself and the person being tattooed.” A self-taught hand poke tattoo artist, Emma describes being “raised by community” and arriving to this work during a pivotal time in the industry. “I came up in the tattooing world in 2016,” she says. "It was a very different time for the internet, and a very different time for hand poke tattooing. There were a lot less people doing the thing that I was doing at the time, and Seattle was a really special incubator for a lot of DIY tattooing.”
Early on, Emma received support and mentorship from other self-taught artists and honed their style by practicing on friends. When she realized that tattooing was a viable path for her as an independent artist, she quit her job in a salvage yard and transitioned into tattooing full time. Emma worked out of the local artist-owned collective Bad Apple Tattoo before opening their studio, Chance Magic, with dear friend and fellow artist Deycha Nhtae. “I started feeling like I really wanted a place that was centered around Black queerness,” she says, of making the leap to shop owner, “a place by and for people that felt like me.” A freak car accident put Emma out of commission for six months before opening her studio, but they credit this experience with being the final push they needed to make it all happen. “It was kind of magic, kind of horrible, but also a gift in the end,” she reflects.
Emma describes Chance Magic, housed in a sun-dappled former factory on the cusp of Pioneer Square and the International District, as a space that’s warm, comfortable, and sweet. “Every time somebody comes in, they’re like, ‘This feels like a living room, in a great way!’ And that’s what we want; that’s what we’re aiming for,” she says. With a nail artist in permanent residence and two other tattoo artists working out of the studio, it does have the feeling of a full house—one where the door is always open, inviting you to wander in, snuggle up on the couch and visit with old friends. For Emma, this atmosphere is intrinsic to their practice and a vital component to how they move through their days, enmeshed in community.
“I don't make art just for myself,” says Emma, who credits a portion of their influence to installation artist Andy Goldsworthy and a lifelong gravitation to nature. “A lot of the installation work I’ve been doing lately has been for groups of people in a specific setting,” she explains, a nod to some of the work she’s created in outdoor spaces to enhance the atmosphere of a rave, for example. Emma continues, “Other people matter, even if I don’t know them, even if we’re not directly connected. I enjoy stepping back and seeing the ways that my world and the love that I have for the people in my life, is reflected in other people that I have absolutely no connection to.” The lens through which Emma sees the world and makes art is one that is in deep love with humanness and inspires participation—whether you find yourself under their gentle needle or cocking your head towards a curious assemblage of rocks you’ve come upon at the beach, in the forest, or here at the Frye.
“What does it mean to love a rock?” asks Emma, in the didactic for their original commission for the Alcove, a piece that has been drawing in delighted viewers since it was installed earlier this summer. “How does imbuing found objects with meaning challenge structures in our daily life that keep us in a constant state of want, distant from each other and from the world around us? The act of looking down at the ground, finding a reason to love what is already there, keeping reminders of that feeling in our pockets, on our shelves, at the bottoms of our bags—guides us toward a different way of living in and loving our world.”
Emma’s piece, Exercise in Letting Go (What We Choose to Hold), is made from found rocks, shells, sea glass, and ceramic amassed over the last nine years, around the same amount of time that she’s been tattooing. It was arranged using an epoxy modeling compound on wood panel and installed atop a photograph taken by Olivia Green of a rocky beach, printed on beautiful Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 paper. “This piece is everything I have collected over the last nine years in Seattle. It’s extremely priceless to me,” says Emma, of its sentimental value. “That’s where the title came from,” she explains, “an exercise in me letting go of these things that I have assigned so much value and meaning to, so much so that I’ve taken them with me, sometimes from house to house to house. And they’re heavy,” she laughs.
This work is so many things, and one of them is a love letter to anticapitalism, to the act of noticing, and to community—their own, and communities she may never know. Emma credits multiple friends in supporting her process while making this work, and when we met, they told me that even the act of creating it was collaborative at times. While putting the finishing touches on the assemblage in West Seattle’s stunning Lincoln Park, Emma describes how passersby would approach her and ask about what she was up to, sometimes even offering their own barnacle dotted rocks and bits of sea glass. “There was one little girl who stopped by and I let her push a piece in with me,” Emma recalled. “That part of it was so special to me, just encountering other people who are also walking on the beach, looking down, paying attention.”
Emma says that making Exercise in Letting Go offered them a prompt that they really got to sit with and interrogate during the creation process; a practice she hopes to continue in future commissions. This piece perfectly encapsulates the magic of an ambling walk across a rocky beach, embracing a slower pace and admiring, and even coveting, elements of the natural world that are so easily taken for granted in the monotony of daily life. This artwork feels approachable; it draws you in but then asks tricky questions: What are you holding on to? What are you trying to let go of? Why?
“What am I choosing to hold?” Emma ponders as our conversation nears its end. “It's always rocks. It's always gonna be at least five pounds of rocks.”
Exercise in Letting Go (What We Choose to Hold) will be on view through October 5, 2025, in the Museum Store. You can see more of Emma’s work by connecting with them on Instagram, at their studio Chance Magic, in the forest, or at the beach, making gentle impressions on the earth by moving stones just enough to make you look again.