About ME
Artist Statement
My work examines the intersections of home, body, comfort and discomfort through printmaking processes such as woodcut and intaglio. Through the use of fabric, paper, and print, I am creating works using nature, touch, and form, to speak on emotion and experience.
Natural motifs, through images that are my own or archive from family albums, reference both literal places or events and symbolic emotional states. I’m creating a visual language that is unique to my story but universal to human experiences or emotions.
Emotions and events live on in our bodies like invisible photographs. I aim to bring the body into my work in a literal and imagined sense. First, by creating paper bodies or stomachs, referencing my own body. Secondly, through the image making and printing process, I am able to move these images out of my body, and into the world.
Artist Bio
Emma Pfannenstiel is an MFA candidate in Print Media and Photography at Boston University, where her work centers on printmaking, photography, and material-based processes. She holds a BA in Art History with a minor in English Writing from Fort Hays State University, along with certificates in Printmaking and Global Studies.
Alongside her studio practice, Pfannenstiel continues to write, with work published in Epochs, Fort Hays Art and Design’s student journal, and her essay “Sexual Themes in Two Plays by William Inge” appearing in Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice (Vol. 13, No. 3, 2024).
She has exhibited her work in both group and solo exhibitions, with recent presentations in Boston in 2026 and earlier solo exhibitions in Kansas in 2024.
Resume & CV
Downloadable versions below