Emma Cocker is a writer, artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art. Operating under the title Not Yet There, her enquiry focuses on exploring models of (art) practice and subjectivity, which resist or refuse the pressure of a single or stable position by remaining willfully unresolved. As a practice-based enquiry, Not Yet There is shaped by an interdisciplinary, hybridized approach, operating restlessly along the threshold of writing/art. Whilst embracing the potential of the essayistic (as a tentative attempt or trial), Cocker’s practice also includes experimental, performative and collaborative approaches for producing texts about, parallel to and as art practice. Processes of condensation, extraction, fragmentation, listing, footnoting, cross-referencing and appropriation are adopted as critical methods for art-writing, alongside the cultivation of a serialized form of prose-poetry collectively entitled Condensations.

Friday, 27 April 2012

Exhibition: Accidentally on Purpose


I have been invited to contribute to the public programme of the exhibition, Accidentally on Purpose  (QUAD, Derby, 
July 27 - October 7 2012) curated by Candice Jacobs and Fay Nicolson.

An exhibition, online publication, audio project and symposium exploring the occurrence of repeating problems and strategies for (re)approaching them. 

The exhibition takes its title from an American Sitcom situated in the banality of the everyday. Its characters strive to make the best of an unfortunate situation; repetitively re-negotiating the uncertainty of their lives. The desire for escapism through the consumption of mass broadcasts and episodic formulae offers an interesting context for this exhibition; which connects the quotidian sitcom to an exploration into the relationship between success and failure, looking at common place materials, familiar situations and repetitious processes as a point of departure. Artists include: Becky Beasley, Karen Cunningham, Michael Dean, Cyprien Gaillard, Ryan Gander, Paul Graham, Jonathan Monk, Rose O’Gallivan, Edit Olderbolz, Clunie Reid, Dan Rees, George Shaw and Ryszard Wasko.


More to follow soon.