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 interchangeable 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.