Emmeline North: The Yorkshire woman on a mission to bring colour to public spaces

Using her middle name Emmeline for work purposes, North has been responsible for a series of public art installations and murals across the region that have been drawing increasing attention. The York Barbican and Crossgates railway station are just two places where her work is on show.

Her art is underpinned by a focus on sustainability and recycling, with a perfect example being her involvement in the creation of a huge “Dewsbury” sign made of recycled materials that greets visitors to the town centre.

The sign, which was installed earlier this year, came about after she stumbled on a series of letters that had previously been on the Superdry store front at the White Rose Centre in Leeds but had ended up in a local reclamation yard.

Having already been working on projects in Dewsbury, North says she quickly saw the potential. “We had ‘D’,‘U’,‘R’, ‘Y’, and I realised you were getting close to being able to spell Dewsbury,” she says.

“I got the other four letters made. I got them for £120 – they are 1.5m high and made of aluminium. I got them in the back of my van and took them back to a unit and pitched to the council that we could create a typography installation for the market and they loved it.”

North, who hails from Leeds, is the lead artist for the Cubic Fruit art and design collective and with its support and that of metalwork artist Mick Kirby Geddes, the old letters were redesigned and the remaining ones created.

She says that the fulfilment of the project is part of a recurring theme throughout her career – coming up with creative visions and being fortunate enough to persuade people to let her make them a reality. North says that goes back all the way to when she was a teenager working at Sorrento restaurant in Crossgates, when she managed to persuade the owners to allow her to paint an Italian vista mural.

“They took a bit of a chance on me and I ended up doing quite a few through word of mouth. I was only 18 at the time.”

After deciding to go travelling to Australia before returning to the UK, art initially went on the backburner for North as she had a daughter when she was 19 and split family life with part-time work at the Halifax Building Society.

But her passion for creativity was maintained by helping her father Geoffrey on a series of property development projects. “I got really into interiors and realised that’s where my creative pursuits lay. I got to experiment on how to work with paint and surfaces and all the practicalities I need in the line of work I do now. I didn’t realise but that was laying the foundations of the stuff I needed to know.

“Trying to balance the artist side and working at a building society was strange because one side was operating in a mathematical way and the other was this release of doing something practical, hands-on and quite creative. My dad is an engineer and quite practical so he taught me a lot about putting things together, working with wood or whatever we were doing.”

In 2013, with her daughter now aged 16, North decided to pursue a full-time creative career. Alongside friend Rebecca Appleby, she opened a studio space at the Redbrick Mill in Batley.

“That was fantastic because it just allowed me to really experiment with lots of different methods of working. I started sewing and learning how to sew and was working with recycled materials a lot.

“Having been travelling all over the place, I became very environmentally conscious about what I was putting out into the world and what I was making. I was trying to work with offcuts and waste materials from the mill and they had things like textile samples and lots of leather so I could work with that. It was basic but I was learning such a lot.”

When they were offered the chance to move to a larger space within the mill, North says that to attract visitors to it, “we came up with this hare-brained scheme of opening a coffee shop”.

She adds: “What I realise now is I just wanted to design and build a coffee shop, I didn’t really want to run it but we ran it and it was a massive success. We set it up with a budget of £500 and cobbled together some chairs from a junk shop. To be honest, it looked absolutely amazing.”

What became Cafe Papiyon opened in 2014 and grew to the point where it had around 12 members of staff. It is still running, though North sold her part of the business in 2018.

“It absolutely just took off so without realising over a period of time that we were essentially running a restaurant. We did so well but it was exhausting and meant you were slightly lacking in the ability to create.

“I decided to sell it on so I could really get back to that.”

By that stage, North had returned to Leeds Arts University to study textiles and surface pattern design and had also been on a formative trip to Africa with her daughter.

“Before I went to start university in 2016, I spent six weeks in Africa with my daughter and that set the scene for how I wanted to work as an artist and really did embed this idea of sustainable practice as much as I could,” she says.

“I did six weeks travelling through east Africa and the harsh reality of the lack of infrastructure of managing waste you really see. It is quite shocking really.

“I just thought if I am going to make and create something, I really would want it to enhance the environment that I’m in and not add to the pile.

“It is just being conscious about what you are making – where it comes from, where it is going and what is going to happen to it in however many years time.”

In another example of successfully selling a vision to the right people, one of North’s university projects that she pitched to Redbrick was to transform its car park area.

“We transformed this ugly looking car park which you could see from the cafe window and was covered in litter and waste from the mill.

“There were eight ugly and dilapidated shipping containers lined up. The mill went for it, we did a massive litter pick and then painted this huge mural on the containers in a Bauhaus style.

“It took me absolutely ages as it was all hand-painted before I learnt to spray paint. All the paint was second-hand recycled paint and we were transforming this environment and it felt so good to do something real that made a difference.

“Going back to that experience of working in a takeaway when I was 19, it was similar. They trusted me and it worked. That is I guess what launched my career and what I do now.”

That project led on to a commission for a hotel in Birmingham and, combined with returning to Australia where her partner hails from, North decided not to complete her final year at university.

While she has done plenty of work across Yorkshire since, Dewsbury has ended up becoming a particular focus and North says one of the most rewarding projects of her entire career was the giant Urban Rewild mural created on the side of the Princess of Wales shopping precinct in late 2021.

The colourful design was inspired by nature, flora and fauna as well as landscapes within and surrounding the town.

“The response from passers-by and the friends I made doing that work was absolutely incredible,” she says.

“That was in 2021. It was about rewilding the town I created this cityscape with botanicals coming through.

“Passers-by at first were asking what the point of it was. But the same people after the end of the 13 or 14 days painting had such a turnaround and were asking if you could put a star in there or a beehive in there.

“It really did become something that was created by the people walking past every day. I was there really early in the morning until really late at night and people were so supportive, beeping their horns and saying ‘You are nearly there’ with it.”

North and the Cubic Fruit team have also been working on transforming a series of shipping containers due to be used temporarily by market traders in Dewsbury when a delayed project to regenerate the market gets under way.

“Success for me is transforming and improving an environment for people who use a space but without adding to the issue of waste and hopefully marking something from what was already there but making it more beautiful,” she adds.

“I absolutely love working outside and seeing the potential in spaces.”