Emma Jenkinson is a mid-life, early career artist based in Hull, UK, and a counselling therapist. She has recently returned to artistic practice after a 14-year hiatus.

Her interests lie in meaning-making from fragmented narratives, and what happens to identity and internal landscape when we share space. 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, text-based works, and photography projects structured around narrative and exchange.

Emma’s projects often employ modular structures, recurrent motifs, or ‘rules’ by which texts, visuals or actions must conform - as a form of organisation and separation. And also to investigate how narratives, identities, and relationships are constructed, dismantled, and rearranged. Her process is also 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 nod to 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.