Morag Emmerson was born in the Highlands of Scotland, her mother Lancashire-Irish-Scottish and her father Yorkshire English. She studied at St Martins School of Art and West Surrey College of Art & Design. She paints with oils on linen canvas, and draws with pen and ink.

Living in London through her twenties, she closely associated with Lindsay Kemp (theatrical genius) and his Company. For one year she modelled at the Royal Academy Schools and the Slade School of Art, and privately for Leon Kossof in his East End studio. "Lucian Freud turned up at my place one day with £100 because I had brought him good luck. He wanted me to give up my job and buy canvas and oils. He said that my paintings reminded him of the doors of a reliquary."

That was a long time ago, and she is still entirely out of step with the art world, and hates what she perceives as the deliberate degradation and destruction of native cultures through bureaucratic and authoritarian global influences, bent on the enslavement of the human spirit everywhere.

She exhibits fairly regularly, sometimes under another name. She's also been published in small magazines and had a play on at the Lancaster Festival. She has worked in publishing and the print in small and insignificant roles.

She deeply appreciates peace and solitude and is a reluctant and reclusive kind of nonconformist.

She has been living in a council house in feudal Surrey for the last 20 years, with a year in the West of Ireland. There is a steep garden, full of birdsong, overlooking miles of undulating downs, with woods, copses and small towns.

Solo Exhibitions & Public Commissions

• 2007 new paintings, the barn, Farnham.
• 2006 "We Sail into the Beauty of the Dark", paintings, fibre art and poetry, 6-13 May, Guildford House Gallery, Guildford, Surrey.
• 2001 IBM Innovation Centre, South Bank, London, introduction of Thought Frames, installation of silk and citrine mobile.
• 2000 Commission for TRASH, triptych, The Green Man.
• 1999 Commission for Surrey County Council, "A Dream of Bright Shadows". Combined arts. Farnham Maltings, Guildford House Gallery and Artslink, Camberley.
• 1997 Bank of Ireland, Killarney, Co. Kerry; Fibre Art and Paintings.
• 1995 Farnham Maltings: Fibre Art.
• 1993 Wembley Conference Centre, commission "Tranquillity", fibre mobile, for Conference on Energy & Health.
• 1987 Paintings, Bush Hotel, The Borough, Farnham, Surrey.
• 1984 "Looking In", paintings, Redgrave Theatre, Farnham, Surrey.
• 1979 Paintings, Poetry & Song, Women's Free Alliance, Regents Park Road, London.
• 1978 "Constance & Erudite", with members of The Lindsay Kemp Company, Neil Caplan and David Haughton, Performance Arts Centre, Whitfield Road, London.