Emily Krill builds her paintings from what time has left behind. Now based in Pittsburgh, she works primarily with found paper—fragments of everyday life gathered from another century—and transforms them into richly layered collages that feel at once intimate and expansive.

Her path to this work began early, studying at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts and later at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. She then spent two decades in New York City, painting while also collaborating with interior designers and architects, an experience that sharpened her sense of composition, space, and surface before eventually returning to Pennsylvania.

Emily’s collages are constructed from paper ephemera dating from the 1850s through the 1970s: ledgers, checks, letters, and handwritten documents once used to carefully record the rhythms of daily life. Though these systems are now largely obsolete, she sees them as vessels of collective memory—quiet records of ordinary moments and human presence. With a simple cut-and-paste process, she assembles both small and large-scale works, then animates them with vibrant inks and playful patterns. In her hands, the elegant script of an 1880s ledger might sit beside the uneven pencil marks of a 1940s schoolchild practicing spelling, collapsing decades into a single visual conversation. The result is work that honors the past while reimagining it, turning forgotten paper into something newly alive.