b. Northfield, Birmingham
I am an interdisciplinary artist and PhD researcher developing dancing-with, a live art methodology that explores how knowledge emerges through embodied relation, movement, sound, smell, and encounter. My practice is informed by intuitive responses to sourced and found materials, environments, and the dynamics that unfold between people, places, and conditions.
Drawing on post-structuralist thought, feminist theory, Black Study, relational approaches to knowledge, and decolonial scholarship, I investigate how knowledge is produced through encounter rather than transmission. As a severely dyslexic artist, I am committed to making diverse modes of knowing visible within educational and artistic spaces.
I often work through live art because it communicates what language alone cannot fully hold. Through real-time encounters, the work foregrounds embodied, sensory, and relational forms of knowledge, creating opportunities for collective meaning-making that exceed text- and image-centred modes of exchange.
My research challenges assumptions that knowledge is fixed, stable, or universally transferable. Instead, dancing-with understands knowledge as something that emerges through responsiveness, participation, and relation. Through performance, pedagogy, and public intervention, I explore how research might remain dynamic, unsettled, and alive within the encounter itself. Can research be free-flowing and unbound by documentation? Can it live on, transform, and continue to resonate within those who encounter it?
I often refer to performance art as 'doing' or live art or even painting, as I don't necessarily see the work as a performance in the traditional sense, but rather gestures, movement, 'dancing-with' / in material that is not choregraphed, this breaks down hierarchy between myself and others as we experience the unknowns at the same time. Materials provide access to other worlds, where the internal meets external. The activation of it allows me to tap into these spaces where the body in action and movement engages with the remnants of personal, cultural, and historical contexts and memories. The location and settings are often predetermined for there pre-existing context.
My work explores historical sites—paintings, landscapes, and biographical—through the activation of materials, some reoccurring, some new. These actions challenge and negotiate broad-ranging topics such as feminism, class, humour, alienation, resistance. I am interested in a liminal space, visually cross-hatching between personal, cultural, and historical. Where these points meet, cross and depart, dissolve, reform.
For me, live art holds possibilities in the vulnerability of such acts that cannot be ‘corrected’, and these possibilities offer openings for new discoveries for both the participant and myself. The error or inability to correct in real time makes it a live, active space for agents to interact, collide, and emerge. It exposes cracks in normative structures and generates new unfolding language in flux, where meaning is made between bodies. The inability to rehearse an already‑made structure becomes a refusal, a site of emergence. Instead, it is where life slips in, chaotic, uncontained, full of potential, and emergence comes into relation. Rather than see knowledge as some ‘thing’ deposited from a knower to a receiver, my live art model sees knowledge as ever-evolving and alchemical, occurring between bodies.
Non‑rehearsal creates a space that resists containment and prediction: it refuses the safety of repetition and instead invites rupture, presence, and attunement. Without rehearsal the body is not performing a script but responding, metabolising, becoming. This refusal of prefiguration opens a terrain where meaning is discovered rather than delivered, where relational dynamics unfold in real time, non‑hierarchical structures emerge, and the work remains porous to interruption, contradiction, and transformation.
As a decolonial method and decolonial aesthetic, I refuse to present a finished object. I reveal the decisions and processes often concealed by colonial aesthetics—exposing and undermining power systems that are usually invisible—and invite viewers to participate in the work’s unfolding. Through live art, material and immaterial traces are animated by present, unpredictable circumstances and non‑premeditated movement, often referencing historical notions in subjective, non‑linear ways.
In the hope of drawing viewers out of passivity and into active participation, I aim to shake things loose by creating new memories and associations—for myself and for those present as co‑creators. Their presence, responses, and interruptions are not peripheral but integral to the work’s unfolding. Together we generate a live terrain where emergence is shared and refusal becomes relational.
I studied at University of Worcester where I earned my BA in Fine Art and was awarded a scholarship to Central Saint Martins where I studied MA Fine Art. I have exhibited in various locations in China, Brussels, London, and other parts of the UK.
Instagram handle: @starkey.emma