Biography


Emma Soefker (American, b. 2001) earned her BFA in Graphic Design from The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2024. Her work delves into the intersection of culture and identity formation, with a particular focus on fashion, art, and storytelling. Since its founding issue in Spring 2021, Emma was an integral part of Strike Magazine Chattanooga, a student-run publication highlighting fashion, art, and culture. She began as a graphic designer and worked her way up to Creative Director, a role she held for three issues, demonstrating her commitment to growth and leadership within a creative team. Emma remained with the magazine through Issue 07, completing her involvement upon graduation.

Since graduating, Emma has expanded her professional experience with an internship at Sterna Studios, where she honed her skills in client communication and professional-level photoshoots. She is was also a stylist at Anthropologie in Chattanooga, where she created style walls, assisted in styling mannequins, and gained hands-on experience styling customers. Emma is currently a Marketing Coordinator at Avison Young, where her role encompasses project management, campaign strategy, copywriting, and creative design. She also assists with social media content for the Clark Tower, further strengthening her digital marketing skills. These roles not only deepen her understanding of fashion and visual storytelling but also provide her with valuable corporate experience, making her well-rounded in both creative and professional environments.

Emma remains deeply interested in art direction, styling, and publication design within the fashion industry and beyond, aiming to further explore these fields.




Artist Statement


Narratives and mythologies shape how we understand ourselves, our desires, and the world we move through. My work engages with these inherited stories, particularly those surrounding identity, femininity, and fashion, treating them not as fixed truths but as materials to be reexamined, reassembled, and re-authored. I am interested in how myth operates quietly in everyday life, embedded in objects, rituals, and aesthetics that feel intimate, sentimental, or overlooked.

My practice is rooted in emotion and accumulation. I work with imagery, garments, and environments that carry traces of use, care, and memory, allowing meaning to emerge through repetition and juxtaposition. Rather than pursuing polish or spectacle, I am drawn to tenderness, contradiction, and the space where softness coexists with autonomy. Objects become talismans, fashion becomes language, and visual clutter becomes a form of storytelling.

Fashion is central to my work as both a personal and cultural system. I am fascinated by its role in social imitation and desire, and by the tension between individuality and conformity that it produces. While fashion often privileges novelty and forward momentum, my work looks sideways and backward, reclaiming historical symbols of femininity and ornamentation as sites of agency rather than passivity. In this way, I treat fashion as an archive, one that can be edited, questioned, and made intimate again.

At the core of my practice is an exploration of individual agency within systems that encourage passive consumption. By reframing familiar narratives and aesthetics, I aim to challenge how value, beauty, and authenticity are constructed within the fashion industry. My work invites viewers to linger, project, and participate, offering space for complexity, sentimentality, and self-definition beyond prescribed norms.


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emmasoefker@gmail.com
© 2025