B. 2004 lives & works in Leicestershire, UK
Emily Hought is a multimedia and performance artist who creates solitary live characters as performative guises to explore ritual and social awkwardness. Beginning with abstract collages, drawing from cubist portraiture, she makes masks, costumes, puppets, and dolls from papier-mâché, textiles, and cardboard, incorporating crochet and knitting as forms of textile-based construction. Her handmade objects foreground slow craft labour, inviting play and humour whilst emphasising time, care, and accumulation. Referencing historical fashions, clowning, and traditions of masquerade, Emily embodies these characters as a means to confront personal anxieties; reframing them as sites of transformation.
"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 returns repeatedly to distinct imagery and engages with a deliberate, obsessive attention to process and repetition. Her characters aim to embody experiences of otherness that blend discomfort with playfulness, where the awkward is not something to overcome, but something to sit within. There is an inherent mischief in dressing up, and she leans into this, curious about the uncanny vulnerability in allowing oneself to be seen.
Further writing and artist statements: