Emma Starkey is a Birmingham-born interventionist/ live artist and doctoral researcher. Her practice is defined by a radical rejection of traditional art education, which she critiques as a positivist system that treats knowledge as a fixed commodity. Instead, she proposes a methodology described as live art knowledges, where meaning is not something to be handed down from an expert to a student, but rather something relational and co-produced in the moment of live art.

Her core artistic philosophy, often titled Rupturing Object White, serves as a political and pedagogical stance against the extractive logic of institutions. This concept is a direct challenge to the white cube gallery model and the Eurocentric standards of polished, stable art objects. Starkey argues that turning art into a finished, sellable product allows institutions to own and refine the lived experiences of artists, particularly artists that also occupy the same space as ‘researcher’ and those from working-class backgrounds. By focusing on the body in real-time, unpredictable exchanges, she ensures that her work remains ephemeral and unpossessable, protecting it from being converted into institutional capital.

Within this framework, Starkey emphasises the importance of the politics of voice and the lived reality of the artist. She frames her research process using the metaphor of liquid to vapour to liquid, suggesting that knowledge can move through gestures, breath, and the physical dynamics of a space rather than being captured in a rigid text. This approach is intentionally disruptive, designed to interrogate the hidden power structures and hierarchies that decide whose voices are considered legitimate in academic and artistic spaces.

While her work involves rigorous intellectual debate that critiques the traditional roles of the educator and the curator. She continues to develop performance as a form of resistance. Her ultimate goal is to create a space where knowledge is recognised as a messy, embodied encounter that refuses to be refined or silenced, reshaped or dulled by elite institutional norms.