Emma Jenkinson is a mid-life, early career artist based in Hull, UK, and is practicing again after a 15-year hiatus.
Her artistic practice employs an ongoing enquiry into communication, relational dynamics, and the fragile architectures of meaning-making. Using sculpture, collage, poetry, photography and social engagement, Emma’s work frequently explores the capacity of language to connect or confound - especially when paired with image.
Earlier works emerged from lived experiences of grappling with the complexities of dialogue, mis-communication, and a desire to be both understood and hidden. This led to sustained exploration of the relational contract between artist and audience - through performance, participatory text-based works, and photography projects structured around narrative and conversational exchange.
These lines of enquiry continue, with current projects often employing modular structures such as re-combinable poetic fragments, recurrent motifs in collage, or ‘rules’ by which texts or visuals must conform - to investigate how narratives, identities, and relationships are constructed, dismantled, and rearranged. This process is often grounded in acts of collection - whether gathering images, objects, fragments of text, stories, or traces of personal experience.
Threaded through much of Emma’s work is an understated humour - a dry observational lens turned towards the awkwardness of being a thinking, feeling body negotiating the messiness of connection. Her practice holds space for contradiction: the longing for framework alongside an acceptance of uncertainty - a safe space for wildness to emerge. Her work invites a form of witnessing this duality which acknowledges that the edges between self and other, speaker and listener, artist and audience are never entirely fixed.
Emma also operates an online service as an LGBTQ-affirming therapist specialising in supporting late-diagnosed neurodivergent people, is mother to a bright and hilarious teen, an unendingly playful cat and a snake with no survival skills. Hailing from a tiny family living on the bread-line in Leeds, she was the first in the lineage to attend university after completing a BTEC National in Photo-media at Leeds College of Art and Design. She pushed through approximately two thirds of three undergraduate degrees across London, Valencia, and Scarborough before finally achieving academic accolade - realising later in life that her differently-wired brain was the reason she was quickly observant to patterns in the ethers but struggled to organise her findings into essay format. Emma feels that there is not much difference between her work as an artist and as a therapist - that both involve non-linear ways of collating and communicating human experiences - especially those which exist on the periphery of awareness - in order to understand ourselves and the world with more coherence, depth and integrity.
Exhibitions and Residencies
2024-2025: ‘Re-View’ 25hr residency and group exhibition, Hull Artist Research Institute (HARI)
2024: ‘Process’ group exhibition with SHU MA Art Therapists, Bloc Projects, Sheffield
2023: ‘The Golden Thread’ 4 x collages in group exhibion for International Women’s Day at HARI
2008: Performance of ‘It Was Only Tea’ at Bradford Playhouse
2008: 4-nights performing ‘It Was Only Tea’ with accompanying photographic exhibition ‘Domestic’ at SHUNT Theatre, London Bridge Vaults