Emily Hought is a multimedia and performance artist who creates solitary live characters as performative guises, exploring social awkwardness as a way of approaching the unstable self. Through costume, masking, puppetry, and live art, she embodies these characters as a means to confront personal anxieties; reframing them as sites of transformation. Referencing historical fashions and absurdist theatrical traditions, her characters and performances are layered and slightly misaligned. She forms distinct characters that never fully settle, existing entirely in mime, remaining open and unresolved.
Beginning with intuitive collage processes, she assembles faces, figures, and fragmented forms that inform the development of masks, costumes, puppets, and dolls. Using papier-mâché, textiles, and repurposed materials, her making process foregrounds slow craft labour, inviting play and humour whilst emphasising time, and care.
Emily returns repeatedly to distinct imagery, guided by an obsessive attention to process and repetition. Living and making become intertwined as acts of quiet ritual. Her work holds space for the awkward and the othered, embracing the mischievous potential of dressing up. Within this, there is a vulnerability: a willingness to be seen while partially obscured.
"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. Emily Hought’s 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.
© Emily Hought
Image courtesy of Nyklaus Thorn