Emma Cullen: October Featured Resident
Socially Distant Art is thrilled to highlight Emma Kath Cullen, one of our featured residents for the month of October!
Emma Cullen (she/her) is a poet and PhD student at Concordia University, living and working on the unceded Indigenous lands of the Kanien'kehá:ka people (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal). Her research explores the legacy of radical poetics in digital communities and considers how collaborative narrative forms can generate new modes of connection and cultural analysis. She is currently working on her first book of poetry, which uses research creation to self-reflexively question her precarious position as a chronically ill/disabled scholar and poet. Her poetry practice is particularly interested in developing creative methods that adapt the work of writing and researching in order to accommodate her symptoms and body. She is also interested in ideas such as the generativity of constraint, interdependent communities, and co-creative art.
Image Description: A white woman with dark curly hair leans back against a glass museum case. She is wearing a turtleneck and seen from the side, her head turned to gaze at the viewer. The photo is black and white with her in sharp focus and the museum displays in the background slightly blurred. | Image described by RMR.
Artist Statement
“My current work focuses on accessibility within education and the arts. My writing is influenced by how conceptual poetry, such as concrete and constrained poetics, use visual elements to signify meaning beyond the textual. I use photography, layered with writing, to achieve this in my poetry (creating a kind of textural text). I am interested in imagining new ways for art to be created in order to accommodate different access needs and collaborating with other artists to realize this in multifaceted, interdependent ways. I believe that constraint, both thematically and formally, offers opportunities for creativity and reflection that envision a non-normative, accessible world.”