Commissioned text in response to Richard Bartle's Pow Wow, part of 'Conflict', 20 -21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, 10 Feb — 9 Jun 2007
" ... The act of burial is an ambiguous ritual that is a marker of both protection and repression: it serves to erase or hide an object, individual or event from the past and locate it beyond the realm of the visible. The event of burial can be understood as a gesture of care where the valuable or vulnerable are placed beyond the reach of harm; or else it might speak of a more wilful concealment or deception at play where certain facts or occurrences are deliberately hidden or corrupted so that they may never be brought to trial. Hidden within the cloudy recesses of both personal and political memory; located in unknown archives and in unnamed graves; or else concealed within coded and impenetrable pockets of the world wide web, the ghosts of unspoken and unspeakable histories still stir from under a fiction of normality. In different ways, both archaeology and psychology work to uncover or reveal these latent layers and historical fragments; drawing them to the surface such that they may be forced to account for their role within the events of the present ..."
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- emma cocker
- Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. 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?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.