Bio

Emily Tonge (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, working across sculpture, fashion, and performance. Her practice investigates how gendered and imperial systems of power are embodied by materials and structures in proximity to the human form. She’s especially intrigued by the in-between spaces and symbolic slippages created by these apparatus and women’s bodies.

Emily’s work engages with post-industrial communities, particularly in the North of England. Acting as a lens to unravel how historic systems of extraction continue to shape bodies, labour, land, and resistance in the contemporary. Rooted in academic and archival research, and shaped by site-specific responses, artworks act as forms of resistance.

She has an ongoing interest in the contrast between the material qualities of fabric and metal within her work, exploring the tension where soft forms – drape, textile printing, and pattern cutting – meet industrial architecture.

Emily was born in Bolton, where she continues to live and work. She gained her BA (Hons) in Fashion at Manchester School of Art (2020) and her MA at the Royal College of Art (2023), supported by a Burberry Design Scholarship.

She recently attended a Kinetic Sculpture Residency with Will Carr (2025), led the artistic curation for the Material Memory exhibition at the British Textile Biennial (2023). She partook in the Arts of Fashion Couture Summer Residency (2021) at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, working with couturiers from Chanel’s Les Métiers d’Art.

Emily’s work has been featured in Press including Vogue (2024), Selvedge Magazine (2023) and AnOther Magazine (2023).