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 whose work is a visceral response to experiences that have often been difficult to see, understand or articulate: sensory overload, physical pain, womanhood, antisemitism, grief and living with multiple challenging conditions. Loud, confrontational and bodily, the work is a radical means of making visible experiences that would otherwise remain private, misunderstood and invalidated.
A recurring experience across Franks’ life is of significant physical, neurological and emotional pain not being recognised, either by herself or by those around her. Despite suffering from Misaphonia since the age of 12 she never talked about it and did not know it was a condition until her 40s, leading her to believe she was the only person in the world who experienced certain noises as attacks on the body. Her Ankylosing Spondylitis condition took eight years to diagnose, leaving her living with physical pain without treatment or explanation. Late diagnosis of autism and ADHD, both of which have historically been under-recognised in women, has also prompted a revisiting of sexism experienced within her upbringing.
Franks was raised in a very working-class family in which women working was perceived as unaspirational, and so they were not associated with academia or education. She understands this partly as a protective mechanism within her Jewish upbringing, and partly as a consequence of the lack of educated working-class female role-models within her family’s broader social sphere.
These experiences of not being recognised or reflected in the world around her persist in critical receptions of Franks’ work. However, comments that the work is simply ‘angry’ or ‘accusatory’ risk perpetuating the same history of invalidation she has experienced throughout her life. Franks instead understands the anger as connected to repeated experiences of not being heard or understood. This is complicated by the fact that she has had to become very private about what she experiences and to hide many of her challenges. The resulting shame and embarrassment can then become acute, for example following a Misaphonia attack when an intense physical fight and flight response subsides before full cognitive distance can be regained.
Franks’ understanding of her Jewishness is similarly entangled with intergenerational trauma, with her nervous system having become ignited since the horrors of October 7th 2023 and the subsequent rise in antisemitism. This further marginalisation, experienced as feelings of invalidation and erasure within society, is compounded by patriarchy, ableism and social expectations around AuDHD, namely that women should occupy a more submissive role, hide their discomfort, and manage shame around neurodivergent behaviour. The work emerges from these extreme challenges and sensations within Franks’ body: experiences that are often taboo, invisible and shame-inducing to other people, but which for her manifest in technicolour sensory intensity. The resulting artworks are visual and embodied responses to her daily life, spanning across artist books, performance, costume, dry points and painting according to what is most present at a given moment.
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