Emma Florence May is a proud trans-woman, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. She works with textiles, found materials, painted surfaces, and installation, treating them as repositories of memory. Her practice reflects on the tension between internal experience and external reality, inhabiting a space between personal archive and speculative landscape, and revealing identity as something constantly negotiated, reimagined, and remade. She also critically explores human-environment relationships and the illusive ‘boundaries’ we like to create between ourselves, others, and our environment.
She has completed Advanced Printmaking and Drawing courses and a Diploma in Visual Arts (Printmaking & Photography) at Newcastle Art School. She has taught at high schools, galleries, and the University of Newcastle. She is currently balancing being a mum, educator and artist.
Emma has been a finalist in the MAC yapang Art Prize (2025); Newcastle Emerging Artist Prize (2018 and 2019) and has exhibited in both solo and group shows at MAC yapang, Timeless Textiles, Onwards Studio and Gallery, NERAM, MRAC, Straitjacket, Gallery 139, Art Systems Wickham, Newcastle Art Space, The Creator Incubator, Watt Space and University Gallery
She is currently based in both Newcastle and Wollongong