'In Emma’s work, nature is embroidered with beads, people rest on each other's shoulders or wander through beautiful yet endangered landscapes.' 

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Emma Boittiaux works semi-autobiographically using photography, writing, embroidery and print to examine collective experience. With ideas of safety and tenderness at the forefront, life’s bruises become manifest through an exploration of her own ties with the land, masculinity, violence and relationships.

Based in London, Boittiaux was born in Normandy, France. The intimacy of her grandmother’s linen runs through her work, bringing the rhythm of rural France to her process and embodying traces of a place she left a decade ago. A lyrical dichotomy plays out through the slowness of the embroidery, the immediacy of digital photography and the centrality of research and writing. The decision to embroider every bead by hand onto the linen ground is an ode to a rhythm where slowness has become an act of resistance.

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For Boittiaux, slowing down in our embrace with the work, our communities and environment, is the only way – de faire lien. Boittiaux is crafting a world that moves with care and gentleness, continuously oscillating between comforting beauty and the discomfort of the unresolved.

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Her photograph from the series ‘Take Care Of Your Brother’ won the prestigious Portrait of Britain award in 2023. In 2025, she published her first story, ‘A Quiet Rape’. A mix of poetry and prose to explore three generations of women trying to find the words to speak about the unspeakable: war, intimacy, sexual violence, and rape.

Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at leading London institutions, including the ICA and the London Heritage Quarter, and has been selected for Les Rencontres Photographiques d'Arles Off in France. Her images have appeared in We Are by the Royal Photographic Society, WIP, and PhotoVogue.

She graduated from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, in 2017.

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