MUTABLE MORPHOGENESIS
By merging scientific methodologies with photographic experimentation, Emma Varga creates images that challenge fixed distinctions between human and non-human, visible and invisible.
June 14, 2026
INTERVIEW
PHOTOGRAPHY Emma Varga
INTERVIEW Melanie Meggs
Emma Varga approaches photography as a site of construction rather than observation. Her images do not attempt to stabilize the world; they work against it. Across her practice, the photograph becomes an unstable surface where material, biological, and conceptual systems intersect. Working between Budapest and London, and informed by her studies in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins, she develops a language that moves between disciplines without settling into either.
What defines her work is not only its subject matter, but its method. The image is built, not taken. In WHENUA, microscopic cross-sections of animal tissue are removed from their scientific context and reconfigured as visual structures resembling topographical abstractions. These forms resist singular interpretation, shifting between interior and exterior, organism and terrain. The body is no longer contained; it extends into the world, collapsing distinctions between biology and geography, origin and environment.
In MOLD, this inquiry unfolds through time. Lumen prints made with plant material are exposed over weeks, allowing decomposition to become an active agent within the image. By refusing fixation, the works remain in flux. Light operates not only as illumination, but in collaboration with time, producing images that are contingent and ongoing. The photograph is no longer a record of a moment, but a process that continues beyond the artist’s control.
Underlying both projects is an engagement with the grotesque as a mode of perception. Varga employs it not for shock, but as a structural language through which vulnerability, control, and violence can be examined. Her images sustain a tension between attraction and disturbance, requiring the viewer to confront their own thresholds of recognition. Emerging from a Central and Eastern European context, this sensibility carries historical weight, enabling a direct engagement with complexity without simplification.
Her use of scientific tools, particularly microscopy, does not reinforce scientific authority but instead exposes its limits. Systems that seek to classify and define the body are unsettled, opening her work toward a posthuman position in which boundaries between human and non-human begin to dissolve. She allows decay, damage, and intervention to shape the image. Photography, in this context, becomes capable of holding instability rather than concealing it. Her work does not resolve. It insists on uncertainty.
Within this framework, Emma Varga repositions the photographic image as a dynamic field shaped by material processes and conceptual inquiry, an active, unsettled space that resists closure. It is from within this position that our conversation unfolds, tracing the origins of her practice, the evolving relationship between art and science, and the ways in which material, time, and perception continue to shape her approach to image-making.
“I got my first camera when I was four years old, so photography has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I think that early relationship to image-making was very instinctive at first. Over time, that impulse developed into something much more conceptual. Photography became not just a way of recording what I saw, but a way of thinking and questioning how images work. That is what led me toward the kind of practice I’m developing now.”
IN CONVERSATION WITH EMMA VARGA
TPL: Your work moves between microscopic observation and landscape-like formations. How do you understand scale as a conceptual tool, particularly in destabilizing the distinction between interior biological structures and external environments?
EMMA: Scale is really important in my work because it lets me shift the body between different states of reading. When something microscopic starts to resemble a landscape, it becomes harder to tell where the body ends and the environment begins. I’m interested in that instability because it makes the body feel less fixed and more part of a bigger material and environmental system.
TPL: You allow organic processes such as decomposition and environmental interaction to shape the final outcome. How do you negotiate control within a process that is inherently unpredictable? What does it mean to you to create photographs that resist permanence and fixed meaning?
EMMA: I don’t really try to control the process itself, I control the thinking at the start, and then I let the process lead me from there. My practice overall is rooted in destruction, construction, and deconstruction. I’m interested in making work and then undoing it, or breaking it apart and rebuilding it in a different form. My last piece, sculpture titled “The Horse Wasn’t Real Until I Killed It”, worked like that too. I casted my own body, then sliced it up and rearranged it to explore questions like what is my body and when does it stop being mine. If I cast it, then cut it apart, then rebuild it, what actually remains of the original body? We were about to take it to an exhibition and just a few hours before installing it someone stole two pieces of it. I had to improvise, decided that I’ll make that part of the concept - and in the end that actually made the work better.
TPL: There is a strong tension between visibility and invisibility, particularly in how hidden biological structures are brought into view. What interests you about revealing what is typically inaccessible to the human eye?
EMMA: What interests me is that revealing what is usually invisible adds another layer of meaning. In Vox Victimae, I explore how living beings become victims, and including phase photographs of the apoptosis of the HeLa cell line helped me show that this process also happens at a cellular level. The microscopic images let me draw parallels between human and animal bodies, and suggest that under the microscope, at a cellular level, you can no longer clearly distinguish between them.
TPL: There is also a persistent interrogation of anthropocentrism in your practice, particularly through the merging of human, animal, and environmental forms. How does your work engage with posthumanist thought, and do you see your images as proposing an alternative ontology of the body?
Emma: I do think my work engages with posthumanist thought, especially in the way it questions the idea of the human as separate or central. I’m interested in what happens when the boundaries between human, animal, and environment start to blur, because that makes the body feel less fixed and more relational. In Vox Victimae, for example, I used microscopic images and animal references to look at victimhood across species, and to suggest that at a cellular level the body is not as clearly divided as we might think.
I wouldn’t say my images propose a fully fixed alternative ontology, but they do open up another way of thinking about the body. Instead of seeing it as a stable human unit, I’m interested in it as something relational and unstable - something that can be classified, damaged, transformed, or reduced. What matters to me is that this isn’t only about human and animal as separate categories, but about bodies more generally, and about who gets to be sacrificed and who gets to make the sacrifice. That is also where the work engages with anthropocentrism: it tries to unsettle the assumption that the human is always the measure of everything else.
TPL: Your practice brings art and science into close conversation, allowing both fields to inform the way you observe, question, and create. How do you define this space within your practice?
EMMA: I would define that space as an artistic practice informed by science. While I’ve grown up around science and scientific ways of thinking, my approach remains rooted in art. I’m interested in how scientific methods, tools, and image-making technologies can be integrated into artistic processes. What matters to me is the way these approaches meet within a single body of work, allowing different ways of observing and thinking to inform each other. That intersection is what continues to shape my practice.
I’m interested in what happens when the boundaries between human, animal, and environment start to blur, because that makes the body feel less fixed and more relational.
TPL: If your work had a scent, would it be closer to a laboratory, a forest floor, or something else entirely?
EMMA: Unfortunately, my work sometimes does have a smell during the process. When I think about the still lifes in Natura Morta or the grotesque tree with chicken heads in Vox Victimae, those materials had a very strong smell, so if the work had a scent, it would probably be something unpleasant, maybe closer to rotten meat than a laboratory or a forest floor.
TPL: What is something about your work that you think people misunderstand? And do you enjoy that misreading?
EMMA: I think people sometimes read the grotesque in my work as something purely shocking or dark, when it is actually more ambivalent. For me, it is a great way of provoking thought, because it can hold discomfort, humor, strangeness, disgust and beauty at the same time.
TPL: Are there particular artists, thinkers, or even disciplines outside of photography that have shifted your approach over time?
EMMA: István Örkény has had a huge influence on me. I see him as a major figure of the grotesque, and his work feels completely singular, not just in Hungary but internationally too. His writing has shaped the way I think about the world, and more broadly, my sense of seeing has also been shaped by a Central and Eastern European reality, where the grotesque is often part of everyday life and perception.
TPL: Is there one piece of equipment, tool, or material that you consider essential
to your practice - something you couldn’t imagine working without?
EMMA: Light is probably the thing I rely on most. As a photographer, light is essential, it’s what I primarily create images with. Since moving to the UK, I’ve become even more aware of my dependence on sunlight, because its absence has made me notice how much it affects my mood and energy.
TPL: When you think about the future of your practice, what excites you most to explore next?
EMMA: What excites me most is building a deeper research trajectory around my latest photobook, Vox Victimae, and using it as a starting point rather than an endpoint. That project began to open up questions about how living beings become legible as victims, and I want to push that inquiry further into the systems, images, and narratives that shape those conditions.
I’m also increasingly interested in expanding the boundaries between art and science, especially now that I’m studying on an MA Art and Science course and have more access to resources and can work with more specific tools and methodologies. What excites me is not just producing images, but developing a practice that can move between different forms of knowledge and mediums.
TPL: On days when you step away from the camera, what are you getting lost in, and is it ever really a break from thinking visually?
EMMA: When I step away from the camera, I’m usually drawn to literature, theatre, and being in nature. Those things help me reset, but they also continue to feed the way I think visually. I don’t really experience them as a full break from making images, because I’m still observing composition, atmosphere, materiality, and how a space or a story produces a feeling. Hiking, especially, gives me a kind of visual and mental openness that often leads back into the work in unexpected ways. So even when I’m not actively photographing, I’m still thinking through images - just in a different form.
