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.