"My practice unfolds from an ethos in which play and alternative performance can open space for reflection and new ways of understanding the absurdities of everyday life."
Emily Hought, b. 2004, recently graduated from Loughborough University with a BA in Fine Art, 2025. Her practice has been recently supported by the AFF Breakthrough Artist Fellowship (2025/26) and her work has been presented across galleries and performance spaces including Humber Street Gallery, Martin Hall Gallery, Two Queens Gallery, and Loughborough University.
Image courtesy of Nyklaus Thorn
Emily Hought is an artist and performer of awkward bodies, wonky faces, and wobbly selves. Through live characters and performative disguises, her work explores social awkwardness and the unstable nature of the self. Emily is interested in the strange humour of being perceived, and uses research into theatrical traditions and historical costume to create figures that sit somewhere between vulnerable and absurd.
Beginning with collage and layering processes, Emily assembles faces, figures, and fragmented forms that inform the development of masks, puppets, sculpture, and costume. She enjoys using bright colours and bold, cartoon-like, shapes that feel nostalgic of childhood. Using papier-mâché, textiles, and repurposed materials, her making process foregrounds slow craft labour, inviting play and humour whilst emphasising time, and care. Her characters move fluidly between image and embodiment, shifting from paper constructions into live presences, often appearing as doubles or echoes of one another across different material states. This recurring use of doubles or "doppels" is a central theme in her current practice.
Across both live and still forms, there is a vulnerability: a willingness to be seen while partially obscured. There is a sustained interest in how identity can be performed, and transformed, across different states of image and embodiment. For Emily, embodying these characters is a means to confront personal anxieties; reframing them as sites of transformation.
Current Exhibitions
Exercises for Two Dandies: Gentlemen at Play, How pleasant to go to a friend on a visit!
Humber Street Gallery, Hull, 2026
20 May – 28 June | 10:30 am-5:00 pm
Free
Our Lady Armiger of the Yielding Banner (Taxidermied) and A Doppel in Chalk: The Proxy Corpse, Catalogue: AA2A and Postgraduate Showcase
Martin Hall Gallery, Loughborough, 2026
18 May - 1 July | 12:00 pm-2:00 pm (weekdays)
Free
© Emily Hought