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

Emma’s work frequently explores the capacity of fragmented narratives to communicate, contextualise and connect - at first utilised purely as titles to photographic works, and later embedded within image, installation or interaction. Her interests have consistently been in meaning-making and what happens to authentic experience and identity when in the company of others.

Early works emerged from experiences of feeling different and mis-understood leading to a conflicting desire to be witnessed and also to playfully codify or obscure. Emma’s projects, while often conducted with participation of ‘the general public’, actually tend to be very intimate - the ‘I’ and ‘You’ acting as a vehicle for exploring relational contracts between artist and audience, and more generally between the individual and the group.

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. Though her projects mostly employ an element of structured collection via recurrent motif or ‘rules’ - providing an orderly framework to investigate how the wild narratives of identity and relationship can be constructed, dismantled, and rearranged. Holding and playing with such dualities acknowledges that the edges between inner parts, self and other, speaker and listener, artist and audience are never entirely fixed.

Emma was diagnosed with Autism and ADHD in recent years, which retroactively gives context to artistic and psychological pursuits.