Emma Leu

I'm a mermaid on dry land is a speculative world inhabited by hybrid creatures, leaky organisms, spikes, tails, and discarded objects. The installation uses the imagined coral bed as a model for composing relationships between bodies, materials, and space.

I create from an embodied way of sensing, composing tactile narratives through installations that unfold as material choreographies. Rather than illustrating a story, these environments invite viewers to navigate them through their own bodies. Drawing on queer theory, underwater mythologies, and my research into cuddles as a method, I use the figure of the mermaid to think through porous bodies, desire, adaptation, and the ways we negotiate belonging.

Materials: glass, metal, textiles, drawing, found objects, squishy toys, wood.