Emma Tholot’s artistic practice consists of installation work combining video, photography, textile, wax, and metal. Her materials, images, and objects act as mediators between emotional grounding and its collective staging ; as revelators of the tension between a vocabulary of intimacy and a regime of ritual ostentation.
From costumes to ex-votos, through references to theater, carnival, circus and their archetypal figures, everything points toward the baroque idea of a display of affects that puts into crisis the established order. Here and there, the heaviness of velvet and the satin sheen catch or reflect the light. Through layering, textile thresholds harbor a potential for revelation.
Emma Tholot highlights the inherent duality of ornament and spectacular display : performance often relies on illusion, on the chimerical.
Her works draw nourishment from circulations, at times geographical — those of our itinerant stories; at times existential — those of the subtle bonds linking sky and earth. These movements are also those of the porosity between the popular and the poetic, the everyday and fiction, domestic gestures and universal narratives. In her installations, every arranged material carries a symbolic density. The gleam of a metal amulet evokes fortune, a white fabric recalls rites of passage, a house materializes a wish for anchoring.
Quite often, the realm of the intangible asserts itself as the counterpart to these plastic elements. Emma Tholot multiplies systems of apparitions : if ghosts and veiled figures punctuate her images, the underlying, hidden within the folds, also reveals itself through technique. Her photographic sublimations or transfers on wax speak of the spectral dimension of the image. If, in her work, layers act as a screen, it is to better invite us to discern within them the mechanisms of belief that we construct, and that, in turn, inhabit us.

Mathilde Badie

Fisheye Magazine – ‘Les coups de coeur — Marina Viguier et Emma Tholot’
Profane – n°19 ‘Amulettes amies’, 2024
ACV Magazine – Issue 02 ‘Carmela’, 2023
Beaux Arts Magazine – ‘Nos plus belles découvertes 2023’, 2023
Time Out Paris – ‘4 expositions qui convoquent fantômes et esprits’, 2023
67e Salon de Montrouge – exhibition catalogue, 2023
MadeInBedMagazine – ‘C. Eugène en conversation avec l’artiste E. Tholot’, 2023
Manifesto XXI – ‘Une jeunesse qui nous tient en éveil’, 2022
Les Presses du Réel – ‘Bureau d’investigation du sacré’, 2022
Nouveau Grand Tour – residents catalogue, 2022
100% L’EXPO – exhibition catalogue, 2022
9 Lives Magazine – ‘100% l’EXPO, 100% gagnant’, 2022
En revenant de l’expo – ‘La Relève 4, Veiller’, 2022
Hypothèses – ‘Quelques réalisations vidéo (…)’, 2020
ENSAD – graduation catalogue, 2020
Bibliothèque de l’ENSAD – Master’s thesis ‘Actes de se tenir, de se vêtir, de se nourrir – et de désirer, en Italie du Sud’, 2019