Artist Statement

“My work is an investigation into what lies hidden behind language and image. The world is a living structure that people clip into a system full of manageable concepts, symbols, and readable messages. I want to help create intelligibility without detracting from the nuance, from what is really there, behind the scenes, and contribute to a domain in which organic change can flourish, a laboratory full of deceleration, a vibratory field that connects spoken, written, drawn, and other artistic expressions. Art is listening to the resonance of something intangible. A mystical hesitation in the creative process can contribute to the encounter between the human, animal, and a spiritual world. My artistic and literary domain explores a terrain between language and image, with attention to timeless sources, the collective memory, myths, codes, and rituals.”

Biography

Emily Kocken (1963) is a writer and visual artist (multimedia). She lives and works in Loenen aan de Vecht. She trained as a cellist and philosopher and studied film and writing. In her novels, essays and art she investigates what resonates behind language and image, a mystical web that connects personal history with other worlds. She develops autonomous art projects, participates in exhibitions, writes novels, essays and stories. She also works on commission and conducts conversations about art and literature.

Background

In 1996 she founded Zero, a multidisciplinary artist collective that was active until 2010. She studied film at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. In 2000 she had a car accident, after which she gave up everything for art and writing. In 2008 she broke through with The Breadman Project, a site-specific installation about the relationship between humans and animals. For the Salvation Army she portrayed homeless people in the Bijlmer with ritual objects. From 2010 to 2018 she was represented as an artist by gallery CH Art Space Amsterdam, then by Lauwer, The Hague, until 2022. With Come Go Stay, a performance installation in collaboration with West, she participated in the exhibition Am I an Animal? in Museum De Domijnen in Heerlen in 2016. In 2013 she made her debut as a writer at Querido with the novel Witte Vlag, nominated for the Academica Literature Prize. The 2017 book De kuur was shortlisted for the Halewijn Literature Prize. Adoptica, her first non-fiction book about her life as an adopted child, will be published in 2025.