Emma Jones - Upcoming Writer-in-Residence

Biography

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Emma Jones (ekj.ink) is an essayist and arts writer. 

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Emma has written a lot about photography. This includes photobook reviews (C4 Journal, ongoing) photography exhibition reviews (Source Magazine, 2023) and with artists on profiles of their work (Jonny Briggs, L'Essenziale Studio Journal V.4, 2022). In 2021, Emma wrote several artist texts for the book publication Photography: A Feminist History. In 2023, she was the lead writer for the photography festival Peckham 24. 

Occasionally, Emma writes more personal essays. Examples include exploring long distance cycling in relation to Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (The Radavist, 2023) and reflections on the work of artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun (Lucy Writers Platform, 2023). 

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What Project Will Emma be Working On?

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Is there anything else you’d like people to know about “Becoming Landscapes” and your aim to make art writing accessible and enjoyable to a wide audience that isn’t included in your application?

There are two main threads to the project I want to work on during my time at Marchmont House. The project is provisionally titled “Becoming Landscapes”. 

The first thread is to write about how British or UK based artists have visualised their physical and emotional connection to a particular place. In a time of climate crisis, but also this swing toward nationalism which has been backed up by a troubling nostalgia for a mythologised and narrow view of the rural British landscape to promote its cause, it feels like an important time to look at how artists have been using their relationship to place to open up conversation and forge connections, with both the landscape and others.

The second thread is to bring that connective thinking into writing about art too. When I was working as a curator I often had to write texts for museum displays. We had to be quite strict about how we wrote captions (for example not to be emotive, and to provide a context for why and how a work was made). I don't have to do that in my own work, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else might be possible! I want to explore how I can still talk about the important context a work was made in, its materiality, and bring in the voice of the artist, while also foregrounding my own experience of looking at a work of art and how that makes me feel or the memories it might take me back to. 

I sometimes forget when I am looking at a work of art that I also have a body, that I am engaging with it as a body. I hope that my writing will have a positive impact on people who might also have had the same experience as me of thinking that there's this thing that we're

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