Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London
3 Nov — 10 Dec 2006
"The image conjured by slide projected travelogues relayed to others in the comfort of a domestic space or home is now synonymous with the cliché and banality of middle class travel and tourism; where the photographic residue of holiday experiences are regurgitated to a bored audience of friends and family. This cultural tradition is one that also attests to the glitch in photography's promise, for the image only infrequently captures the experience of the moment and more often strips the event of any meaningful content or action. Arguably the photographic record or memento of travel can only ever be a pale echo of the experiential encounter with a place, for its documentary value might serve only as an aide memoir for those who participated in the actual journey itself. Here any transferable meaning is rendered void by the chasm of experience between that which has been authentically felt or seen and how this then translates as an anecdote or narrative that can be offered up to others..."
See full text here
or in Work, Starmaker, 2005 on Heather and Ivan Morison's website - http://www.morison.info/
- emma cocker
- Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839