Emiline Trenton
Emiline explores intimacy within self, healing through the bodily and the performative. She is an international practitioner, interrogating architectural textiles for pain and rehabilitation, working artistically and methodically as an artist, designer, and researcher.
Fascinated by the dialogue between structures and the body. It is haptic, the subversive, honing the deeply personal, reflecting upon ancestral trauma and oppression of bodies. Merging the poetic and the scientific, she employs knit to catalyze a lost layer of protection, shielding and unveiling.
Emiline is a graduate of the Master of Arts, Textiles Programme at Royal College of Art and the Bachelor of Industrial Design, Industrial and Interaction Design Program at Syracuse University, New York.
Emiline Trenton explores the emotional and structural capacities of textiles through sculptural knit. Her work reflects on pain, memory, protection, and the ways we hold and process the unseen. With a background in industrial and interaction design, Trenton brings a human factors approach to craft—investigating how structure, pressure, and material relate to bodily experience.
Knit, for her, becomes a language of care. It is a method of repetition, tension, and release. She engages industrial knitting machines alongside hand-led processes, working with compression, cavities, and gestures to create forms that are at once intimate, architectural, and performative.
Trenton’s practice is research-based and intuitive, grounded in the poetics of material and the politics of softness. She draws from feminist and somatic theory, clothing and ritual, and the body as an archive. Her sculptural installations exist as emotional infrastructures—quiet objects that act as both shield and offering.
Her work does not seek to resolve pain, but to meet it—to create space for reflection, protection, and transformation. In this way, her textiles become tools for slowing down, feeling through, and remembering what the body already knows.
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I explore intimacy within self, healing through the bodily and the performative. My work unravels textiles as both emotional and structural membranes—mapping pain, pressure, and movement, where materials act as both shield and opening, both tension and release. With a background in industrial and interaction design, I approach knitwear through a human factors lens—curious about how structure, form, and material hold memory and sensation.
I work sculpturally with industrial knitting, often through slow processes of layering, draping, and compression—material as a way of thinking, of touching, of remembering. I draw from embodied knowledge, feminist theory, and personal experience, exploring how textiles become sites of both care and resistance.
For me, making is ritualistic, a process of translation between the intangible and the tactile. I consider how textiles can shield and expose, protect and provoke—soft structures as emotional architectures. Whether submerged, suspended, or stretched, the work is always in dialogue with the body.
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