Emma Senft

Emma Senft is an artist and woodworker based in Montreal, QC and Madison, WI. Senft holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They create furniture and sculpture using wood, textile and decontextualized construction materials. The interaction between our bodies and the built environment inspires their research. Using sculpture and installation, Emma works to use scale and spatial arrangement to prompt the viewer’s awareness of their own body in relation to the work. They are the recipient of grants from Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. They have participated in residencies at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, Penland School of Craft, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in South Korea.

Artist Statement

My research considers perception and the overlap of visual experience with tactile and spatial experience. I am interested in the interaction between our bodies and the built environment. What knowledge and memories does each side carry with them into that interaction? What have we inherited and what do we build anew? I investigate abstracted representations of the body, embodied experiences of the world and relationships between selves. Using sculpture and installation, I use scale and spatial arrangement to prompt the viewer’s awareness of their own body in relation to the work.

Thinking of our built environments as pliable, I explore how the world around us can be in turns rigid, fragile, unreliable, impervious to our attempts at intervention, and deeply malleable. My work is an ongoing conversation of structure – a back and forth of removing and (re)applying rigidity or embracing suppleness. Through material negotiation I represent elements of the built environment in varying degrees of detail or abstraction. These objects and installations have an adjacency to the world we know, slightly familiar but materially translated, shifted in scale and surface. Mixing familiarity with unexpected materials and abstraction, I ask the viewer to consider their relationship to everyday environments.