Cartographies of Where I Come to Be explores identity as a continual process of movement across time, place, memory, and relationships. Through collage, assemblage, textiles, painting, and installation, the artist maps a personal journey shaped by trauma, gender transition, differing experiences of love, and the ongoing search for integration and authenticity.
Identity is approached as something never fixed but constantly formed through shifting emotional and spatial landscapes. Drawing on the child protection model: The Three Houses, Emma’s work navigates internal states of vulnerability, resilience, and hope, imagining these emotional terrains as interconnected dwellings rather than separate stages. The project asks how we inhabit different versions of ourselves over time, and how personal histories echo through the present while shaping imagined futures.
Emma is a proud trans-woman and Newcastle-based 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.
