Bio:

Emily “Lou” Elhoffer (they/her) is a multidisciplinary artist based in St. Louis whose work spans sculpture, photography, and digital media. Through softened forms, domestic materials, and bodily references, Lou explores the thresholds between object and organism, comfort and constraint.

Working with techniques like upholstery, collage, and digital manipulation, their practice investigates the tensions between containment and release, the grotesque and the tender. Lou’s work often conjures hybridized figures—part furniture, part flesh—that reflect on the body as a site of both vulnerability and power. Drawing influence from feminist art histories, design, and the absurd, their installations ask how bodies remember, adapt, and resist.

Lou’s work has been exhibited and collected both nationally and internationally. Their ongoing inquiry considers the overlap between personal mythology and collective memory, shaping tactile environments that challenge assumptions about beauty, passivity, and form.