Profile

Install Gate Of Horns Exhibition, Carl Freeman Gallery 2025.

About The Work

Emma Franks (b.1972) is a visual artist living and working in London.  Emma’s work is autobiographical and explores the many facets of her identity which include Judaism, neurodivergence and living with a chronic health condition, all from a feminist perspective. Loud, confrontational and bodily, the work is a radical means of making visible experiences that if left unexpressed would remain festered and stagnant. 

Solitary figures and dark humour recur throughout the work.  Bodies are exaggerated, emotions are larger than life, colours are saturated and images are confronting, allowing the work to be vulnerable, sensitive, bodily, challenging, funny and emotional.  Its formal intensity is inseparable from the intensity of the experiences it addresses.

Franks has found figures from mythology and ancient cultures useful as protagonists in her personal story.  Lilith, Chalcolithic Figurines and Monsters are recurrent archetypes that she is drawn to, appearing interchangeably according to what is most present in her life.  Each offers a different means of giving form to experiences that otherwise remain hidden.

Lilith is associated with empowerment, rage, rebellion, bravery and Jewish feminism.  Franks identifies with Lilith as an established feminist icon historically used by Jewish women during second-wave feminism.  In this context, Lilith’s embodiment of female rage, power and rebellion provides Franks with an icon through which to explore her deepest desire to feel invincible.  The work becomes an attempt to empower herself: to manifest or ‘fake it until you make it’.

Chalcolithic Figurines have been part of Franks’ practice since she visited the Nicosia Museum in Cyprus during an art residency with the Cyprus School of Art (2023).  She is drawn to these ancient representations of the female body because they depict it realistically: curvaceous, fully breasted and free from the idealised male gaze that shapes more contemporary representations.

Monsters and ugly distorted figures provide another means of self-expression.  Following a Misaphonia attack, Franks takes on the identity of a Monster as she deals with the immediate rage before it transforms into subsequent feelings of shame.  This archetype also connects to the history of Jewish women being depicted as loud, dominating, brash, overbearing and monstrous within antisemitic literature and imagery.  The Monster becomes something to reclaim instead of submitting to societal shame.

Franks’ howling solitary figures channel a kind of desperation for these internal experiences to be seen.  They have become not only useful icons of her conditions but also processes through which to expel them from her body.  Lilith offers a means of manifesting empowerment in place of previous disempowerment; the Chalcolithic figurines provide a way of representing and affirming the lived experience of inhabiting a female body; and Monsters give form to illness, rage and Jewish self-assertion, a more bearable alternative to the social expectations that Franks more usually encounters.

Honesty, breaking the taboos surrounding womanhood, neurodivergent conditions and illness are therefore central to Franks’ work, continuing a feminist tradition that includes Jewish artists such as Nancy Spero.  Having had to hide her challenges and submit to expectations about how women should behave within everyday life, Franks feels it is vital that the work does not itself conceal her lived reality.  Instead, it must be vulnerable and confrontational because the very experiences it addresses are themselves intense, bodily and hidden from view.

Franks studied Fine Art at Brighton University (1994), Art Psychotherapy at Hertfordshire
University (1999), and Studio Painting at Turps Banana Art School (2023), and has also
worked in education and psychotherapy.

The particular image of Lilith that Franks uses comes from an ancient incantation bowl from
500 CE, exhibited in the Feminist Power exhibition at the British Museum (2022). Lilith
became the founding mother of the first fictional feminist religion created for Franks’
performance The 13th Tribe (Turps Banana 2023). Lilith work was subsequently exhibited in
The Temple of Lilith gallery as part of Gate of Horns curated by Hettie Judah (Carl
Freedman 2025).

Exhibitions

‘Inhabiting Bodies’ AGBI, London (2026); ‘The Books Of Lilith’ APT Gallery,
Deptford, London (2026); ‘Gate Of Horns: Myths of Resistance, Symbols of Defiance’ Carl
Freedman Gallery, Margate, Kent (2025), ‘Bow Open x Lindsey Mendick present A Personal
Treasure’, Nunnery Gallery, Bow, London (2024); ‘Blink’, Safe House, Peckham, London
(2024); ‘Ripe Banana Leavers Show’ Taplow House, Walworth, London (2023); ‘Naissance’
and ‘Re-Naissance’ Unit Gallery, London (2023); ‘Recreational Grounds VII’ Wendover
House car park, Walworth, London (2023); ‘Love, Celebration and the Road Ahead’ TJ
Boulting, Fitzrovia, London (2022); ‘Mood Times Ten’ Fitzrovia Gallery, Fitzrovia Gallery,
London (2022); ‘Arundel Contemporary’ Arundel, West Sussex (2018); The Stratford Gallery,
Stratford, London (2018).

Publications

https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/EBYJHC4U5ARIWFYTJ6PR/full

Podcasts

 

videos

https://click.email.vimeo.com/u/?qs=0d6a16df2c5087fa0c2a60fbf13077acbc99c10acb6523eb8013b8607f6429cf06f33aeb07c918fb5f165074b6141c630710de1554ceb00ece93bf34d091aae6