EMMA CONEFREY

My work explores the female body through sculpture and casting, using materials like dental wax to reflect the fragility and malleability of how we perceive ourselves. The process of casting, taking a direct impression of the body, allows me to examine the female form as both subject and object, shaped by the gaze and by the words of others. Dental wax in particular holds a tension between intimacy and discomfort. It captures the body with raw honesty, while its clinical associations reflect how women’s bodies are often examined, interpreted, or spoken over.

Materiality plays a key role in my practice, alongside themes of femininity, ritual, and belief. I’m interested in the conscious will it takes to stay alive and how human beings create structures like religion to give meaning to that effort. Religion, for me, acts as a mirror of our collective insecurity. It is a construct built to reassure us that we are doing things right, that our actions are aligned with something larger than ourselves. My work often reflects this search for something colossal, something divine. Not necessarily found in a church or a god, but in the quiet rituals of daily survival and the way we try to stay connected to the natural world.

Through sculpture I am tracing a line between the body, belief, and the urge to belong to each other, to something sacred, or simply to ourselves.