Emily Blaschke is an artist passionate about sustainability and dedicated to breathing new life into discarded materials. A natural bricoleur, Emily sources her materials from antique shops, salvage yards, and the Yarmouth dump, then repurposes them into innovative, layered mixed-media art objects. Even her representational paintings, which lack the usual assemblage elements, are made with expired nail polish and leftover house paint. Her layered compositions often incorporate American icons, political messages, and other remnants of pop culture, springing from two dimensions into three. Emily studied at UC Berkeley and later at Maine College of Art. Her early figurative work included portraits painted after her daughters were born, while collage and mixed media stayed close to that practice. After moving from San Francisco to Maine more than a decade ago, the assemblage pieces stepped forward and became the center of her studio. Emily's Maine roots run deep: her grandfather co-founded Down East Magazine on the kitchen table with her father and his three brothers, and Emily spent every childhood summer with her grandparents in the Camden area. Emily works in series, often by theme, and welcomes commissions, including a memorable wedding-dress piece anchored in Casco Bay imagery. "I would like them to have a sense of discovery, joy, interest," she says of what she wants viewers to feel in front of the work. Alongside her studio practice, Emily has built community through the Portland Museum of Art and the Yarmouth Arts Committee, where she chairs the gallery program at the Merrill Memorial Library and 317 Main Community Music Center. Learn more about Emily Blaschke on Radio Maine.