Visual artist Emma Pike Follow.Art Card

About me

Emma Pike is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist working primarily with hand-painted textiles, sculpture and installation. Her practice explores the body as a shifting landscape shaped by pressure, rupture, repair and time.

The current project, Fault Lines, uses cotton quilted silk as a mapping surface. Through layered dyeing, bleeding pigments and hand stitching, the works reference topographical maps and geological formations. Colour functions as emotional material, while stitched lines trace moments of fracture and repair.

The project emerged from experiences of shifting postpartum psychological states, but has grown to address wider states
of instability — emotional, environmental and political.

The artist is interested in how both bodies and landscapes absorb stress, carry memory and transform through change.

Her process embraces unpredictability. Pigment spreads, stains and resists control, allowing the material to behave as an active collaborator. This balance between intention and chance mirrors the themes within the work itself. By using textiles — a medium historically associated with care, labour and feminine making
— the work critically engages with hierarchies of material value, embodiment and emotional labour.

Positioned between textile tradition and contemporary abstraction, her work challenges assumptions of
softness and craft. She uses fabric as image, object and environment, exploring how vulnerability can hold strength and how intimate materials can speak to collective experience.