Within her artistic practice, Emmeline de Mooij uses installation, performance, sculpture, textile and video. An important subject in her work is care, maintenance and repair. De Mooij investigates the mechanisms behind the low status of care in society, such as the disproportionate burden of women in paid and unpaid care work. Additionally, with her work de Mooij explores speculative scenarios that offer an alternative for the dominant ideal of the human as independent and unitary being. Again and again she examines the possibility of recuperating a lost unity between the human and its surroundings, based on the recognition of the inter-relational character of being human: embodied, embedded and in symbiosis with other life forms.

Working with a vocabulary that resonates as much with the tenets of feminist performance as it does with the conceptual frameworks of institutional critique, de Mooij approaches seemingly a-historical myths of artistic expressivity as a means to challenge the very gendered, classed, and racialized structures that support it.

Exploring the possibility of recovery within the substantive frameworks of de Mooij’s work also manifests itself in its formal aspects. De Mooij switches between different techniques and media. She often uses performance to settle the physical and emotional distance to an art object, the body and other matter. For example, art objects have conversations with a therapist, a photo printed on a carpet with integrated massage motors serves as a 'massage photo', a workshop takes place in which the participants confront the contents of their own full vacuum cleaner bag, or a handmade costume, especially made for an electric massage chair, that softens the replacement of physical contact by computer-controlled touch.