Emma is a London-based artist, writer, and scientist.

Her practice utilises painting, drawing, microbiology, and performance to tell stories of intimacy.

Specifically, Emma makes art about microbial transfer during kissing.

This focus began as an exploration of the microbiome as a metaphor for self-perception. It evolved into an interdisciplinary body of work that muses on the wonderfully gruesome ways the self can be encountered in within the other.

In May 2025, she began building an interspecies self-portrait by documenting the ways she appeared on the skin of others as a result of connecting with them. She invited people to have their mouth microbiome sampled before and after kissing. The microbes were cultured on petri dishes and the kisses were filmed, and together turned into a series of pencil and ink sketches, acrylic and oil paintings.

In her work, the skin is conceptualised as a permeable container of the self and a place where growth happens through contact, but also a site where we can disintegrate, momentarily, into one another.

This interest in the momentary is inspired by her dance practice, where she delights moments of beauty that are destroyed as soon as they are created. This emerges in her use of video frames, confessional writing, and resin-treated petri dishes, each capturing a frozen moment in time and space.

By focusing on the mouth, Emma further explored the semiotics of romantic love and queer sensuality through a critical feminist lens. In this, the mouth and its microbiome became a delightfully grotesque palimpsest; capable of telling layered, multilingual stories.

Most recently, this has evolved into kissing booth installations, abstracted paintings and prose performances where she shares immunological, evolutionary biological, and personal perspectives on the “art and science”of kissing.

Prior to studying Art and Science (MA) at Central Saint Martin’s, she studied Cell and Molecular Biology (BSc, Durham University, 1st Class Honours) and Medicine, Health and Public Policy (MSc, King’s College, London). Accordingly, her art both incorporates and playfully challenges scientific concepts, knowledge systems, and materials.

She has a PhD in Biosocial Epidemiology from University College London. Her thesis identified associations between cultural engagement patterns, socioeconomic and demographic barriers, and health outcomes. She showed that although cultural engagement is socially patterned, there are independent associations between engagement and physical, mental and biological health outcomes.

In other words, that art is good for us.

Emma believes that this is because it allows us to connect meaningfully with other humans, both through history and across the world, generating a sense of belonging and shared humanity.

These conclusions surface within her creative ethos, which values both scientific integrity and cultural democracy as well as storytelling, honest, vulnerable expression, and meaningful human connection.