Emerald Wise
- Tutor (Research) and Exhibition Lead
- Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA)
Emerald Wise is a creative practitioner, academic, and educator, in the expanded field of architecture, whose work revolves around ways of looking at the world and embodied processes for enacting knowledge.
Emerald is a Tutor (Research) in RCA’s School of Architecture, where she contributes to the coordination the studio program for the MArch and curates student exhibitions.
Her teaching practice is grounded in the 4E theory of cognition, which focuses on continuing the embodied and enactive studio-based learning tradition of RCA, while also promoting opportunities for students to be embedded in real world projects and to engage in emplaced learning through traveling studio programs.
Prior to her role at RCA she taught architecture, interior design, urban design, and visual communications, for over a decade, across various institutions including: the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Monash University, the University of Western Australia, the University of Newcastle, Curtin University, and Nova Scotia College of the Arts.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
More information
Research interests
Emerald’s research explores the dynamic spatial relationship between self and world. Her work weaves together an enactive approach to creative practice, with research into perceptual neuroanatomy, forming a research methodology that connects a variety of embodied practices, that span from meditation, to drawing, making, and nature sports.
Practice
Emerald co-founded UNMAKE studio, the architectural practice Whispering Smith – which she left in 2018 – and maintains a collaborative drawing practice with Dr Beth George.
UNMAKE Studio is a critical spatial practice that Emerald runs with D’Arcy Newberry-Dupe of the University of Newcastle. Their work shifts between architecture, sculpture, furniture, and event or ritual practice. The pair collaborate with many other artists, academics and creative practitioners, as they explore the dynamic relations that define self, body, home, and world.
Emerald’s award-winning and internationally published collaborative drawing practice with Dr Beth George primarily explores concepts of perception, memory, and orientation. Their work has been published with Drawing Matter Archive, ArchitectureAU, and Tapestry Weaver.
Whispering Smith is an architecture practice that Emerald co-founded with the current sole director Kate Fitzgerald. The practice primarily engages with medium density residential projects in Walyalup-Fremantle, with a focus on social and environmental imperatives. Emerald left this practice in 2018.
Current and recent projects
Remembering Nothing, 2025
Emerald’s doctoral research examined how creative and cultural practices have the capacity to alter our sense of being in space. To explore this topic she, firstly, reframed spatial perception as material, responsive to deliberate modulation rather than a fixed backdrop against which experience unfolds. With this reframing she conducted an extensive media analysis that co-considered the lived and neuroanatomical dimensions of spatial perception; which she used to develop a Dematerialised Architecture of perceptual world-making.
Perceptual Architectures, current
Emerald is now developing a research programme centered on perceptual architectures. This programme involves three research areas:
New Orientations asks: how contemporary forms of digital mediation are transforming the ways emerging designers perceive space, and explores what role pedagogical practice might play in grounding, recalibrating, or expanding these changing perceptual relationships.
Collaborators: Tom Greenall, Mattero Mastrandrea, Katie Gaudion, and Marisa Musing
The Prosthetic Self: develops a new theoretical account of embodied incorporation as the foundation for a situated theory of agency. It investigates the largely unexplored territory that exists between prosthetic rehabilitation, the material incorporation of creative media, and spatial cognition.
The Displaced Architectural Body: opens a discussion between pedagogical innovations that train architectural students in Spatial Intelligence, and therapies that engage with the detrimental effects to spatial cognition that emerge from traumatic displacement or neurodegenerative diseases that affect spatial cognition.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Selected upcoming authored publications
2026, Cartographies of attention—drawing away from Cartesian mapping, DrawingOn, awaiting release date.
2026, The Topology of Touch, Tracey, awaiting release date.
2026, Cartographies of Attunement and Rupture, Drawing Matter, awaiting release date.
2026, Dematerialised Architecture, Kerb, awaiting release date.
Collaborative drawing practice with Dr Beth George:
Selected exhibitions
2024, TravelDrawings. Group Exhibition. Cullity Gallery.
2023, Tapestry Design Awards. Group Exhibition. Australian Tapestry Workshop. Awarded.
2021, Out of the Sea. Group exhibition. Maitland Art Gallery. Published: Fabric Quarterly, 2021
2019, Projective Cast. Group Exhibition. Studio One, Auckland.
2019, Group Exhibition, Watt Space, Newcastle.
Featured publications
2024, Drawing as Travelogue, Drawing Matter Archive, 27 Dec 2024.
2023, Tapestry Design: Australia AU, 2023
2023, Tapestry Weaver, 2023.
2021, Out of the Sea: Fabric Quarterly, 2021.
UNMAKE studio
Selected exhibitions
2023, Synesthetic Supper: Errol Street Activation and Residency. Funded by City of Melbourne Arts Grant
Publications
2026, Hat, Hand, Boot, an essay in the form of a shared meal. TU Dublin, Nov 2025.
2025, Synesthetic Supper, Doubt, May 2025
2025, Synesthetic Supper, Kerb, Nov 2025.