b. Northfield, Birmingham
I am an interdisciplinary artist, primarily focusing on live practice, movement and action. My practice is informed by intuitive responses to both sourced and found material and environments. As a severely dyslexic artist, I work to make other modes of knowing prevalent in educational spaces. I often choose performance at conferences because it communicates what language cannot fully hold: it invites embodied, sensory, and relational knowledge, opens space for collective meaning‑making, and disrupts conventional, text‑centred modes of exchange.
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.
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, and joy. I am interested in a liminal space, visually cross-hatching between personal, cultural, and historical. Where these points meet, cross and depart, dissolve, reform.
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 participate and myself. The error—or inability to correct in real time—makes it a live, active space for agents to interact, collide, 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 being.
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, rather than presenting 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