Ema never moved house until starting her studies at NUA. This geographical consistency/ continuation throughout her life has shaped Ema’s practice deeply in ways that are only now revealing themselves to her.

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This ongoing work is Ema’s mission to find emotional resolve. Her practice attempts to translate the feelings she has harboured about ‘home’ into the physical world, to create a space [,a home] she has been longing for but never found. Ema’s work has continuously followed themes of the uncanny, the domestic, the [female] body, domestic ritual, anti-form and of course, the home. In her final year we see all these themes and more culminating together to create “The Body Is The Home”.

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The process of creating this work has been cathartic in ways Ema could never have imagined. Once this project was a goal to tell everyone who would listen this is how she felt; everything she once loved had been covered in this unbreachable mass. The objects inside were preserved perfectly but locked away all the same. Perhaps if she got to them they would be tainted, turned rancid like a mummy being exhumed. It was only in physicalising these thoughts, memories and emotions that this mass now became approachable : it hasn’t melted away but Ema has come to love the ooze that covers her life.

This juxtaposition of creating something slightly unsavoury in her mind, but in that process of physical creation the very thing that was unsavoury becomes the safe-haven she only dreamed of. The objects Ema has surrounded herself with to translate this discomfort now hold her close and feel like family; they are the home she always wanted.

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To see more from 'The Body is The Home' visit Ema's instagram @emajsaxby