Four Letter Word.

Emma Roche’s Work.

Phil King.

Artist’s work: They work, not simply on their own work but usually in other occupations as a
means of survival. Many artists try and cloak this necessity in order to perpetuate a kind of
pious romantic professionalism of unfettered plenty, a kind of already ready-made market
primed self-suffciency free of everyday grind, but Emma Roche foregrounds its necessary yet
mundane working nature in her artistic work. While in her role as an artist she might seem to
question work, she frames that role in terms of her other work; she remains a worker. The
piety of a work ethic appears to be foregrounded as inescapable condition.

Often her titles reference some day job: Is There Anything Else That I Can Help You With, for
example, refers to the 1 year and 13 days that the artist worked in a call centre and had to end
every call with the phrase. The specifc measurement of the exact time period speaks volumes.

And yet she also clearly equates her work in the studio to a form of work, she once told me
that the title Stress Leave was not in relation to any day job breakdown, (she’s never had any
such leave), but referred instead to times that she’s had to take a break from painting. The
resulting painting itself is a hilarious and poignant piece of work. A rich array of divergent
approaches to mark making and in your face oil painting, it embodies a sort of dysfunctionally
contained expressionism. A ‘sort of’ fgure dominates it; Is that hair? Is that a hand? We have
to try and fgure out what is going on, any guarantee of clear sense is taken leave of, and the
result is powerful and enthralling all at once. Work and escape from its unifying ethic unite in
a sort of diagrammatic nightmare that is actually a kind of relief.

It’s easy to take for granted something of Emma Roche’s achievement in these paintings, to
simply understand them in terms of some superfcially apparent expressionism, more of a
same kind of painting, to mistake them as participation in some sort of particular painting
genre. Huge mistake; there is a kind of scabrous objectivity at work in these oil paintings, in
the kind of space that she has managed to create in them and that seems to occur in their
event.

It’s hard to fgure out how she has managed to create such an objective punch. For me, I think
it is in the sense that she has invented them as a kind of self-contained body of work; that these
are her ‘oil paintings’. And they sit alongside a number of other possible bodies as a part of her
work as a disjunctive whole.

I frst got to know her work in terms of her knitting pieces. By combining knitting and painting
she’s created a sense of painting as a kind of habitual ordinary craft, and yet the creation of
the long threads of acrylic paint to be knitted into her extraordinary hybrids turned her studio
into a kind of light industrial production site. A whole manufacturing process becomes
evident; work takes over the studio with its demands and logics. A rich quasi-parody activity
develops in full absurdity. Her studio is dominated by a sense of profane labour in which
production is at one with the product, it is her art. And it is there that, on the walls, we fnd
the oil paintings and their sense of challenging and liberating disorganisation. They seem to
embody this sense of production/product identity, part and not part of it, resistant to, and yet
utterly part of her art, at one with it in a kind of aggressive and ambitious silence. They are
kind of stupid, they dumbly resist their own condition; if they are so real it is because they
resist the demands of the studio logic, they insist on their own somewhat marginal and
indeterminate terms, unjustifable afterthoughts that grow and create their own demands.
These paintings, in spite of rather than because of any artistic guarantee, claim our attention.
They are free painting; as a form of pressure apparently free of conscious will they undermine
both work itself and the leaving of it. They are art.

The title Part Time Pro-Rata 2 gives us a matrix to cling onto after the string of debilitating
realisations that these odd, eccentric, paintings carry forward. Work itself moulds and shapes
us and contains the sweeping generalisations that this body of work provokes us into trying to
organise in some way. But this is a part time job, jostling with all the other jobs that try and
defne our lives and dreams. If anything these paintings are there to insist on failure of any
over-all identity and to embroil us in the hilarity of a kind of critical dissolution; the comic
fgures that inhabit them, personages that march uninvited into our world, wave the banners
of an absolute partial power, and a partial power is really no power at all.

Another part of the interacting complexities/complexity that is Roche's art is a sense of the
radical integration of good and bad. This is something that relates to work, because generally
work in itself is vaunted as an ultimate good, a kind of measure of goodness. I've wanted to
avoid responding to the paintings by reaching for the poetry inherent in French philosophy
resources, though Roche's interest in and reference to fgures such as Artaud and Derrida
opens a double lane highway to drive that vehicle down. I will however summon George
Bataille talking about his book Literature and Evil. He said, equating writing with bad and
working with good, that: Writing is the opposite of working, this might not sound logical, but still, all the
amusing books are efforts that went against work.

Emma Roche's paintings as a whole create a place of awareness of such a sentiment: they both
embody and question the nature of work; they are ‘good’ because they are a kind of work, they
wear their labour on their (knitted) sleeve, and they are ‘bad’ because they simultaneously
emerge regardless of such discipline, in a form of passive resistance to it. The oil paintings are
the ones that seem to emerge free of the demands of the artists overall work; they are pieces of
her work and yet individually seem to have a self-contained power to question its overall
demands. These are, in their withdrawal from their own working condition, from the fact of
the work that made them possible in the frst place, situated as a kind of ‘anti-work’, like the
illuminations generated by hard working monks of old, they fourish as distracting, yet
ultimately vital, marginalia to the main knitted text.

Oddly – paradoxically – what these oil paintings show us is that it is in the work of painting that
the work of art can most plainly embody its own anti-work, anti-art nature. They take a break
from painting and yet are undisputedly just painting. Pure Love, a small painting full of a sense
of invented childhood purity and play, acts through an uncontrived rapidity of execution in
which a Darth Vader mask wearing roller-skating Nun is turned into an ultimate example of
this paradoxical principle. It’s a work that lacks nothing, or rather doesn’t lack nothing, it’s an
absurdist ‘power fgure’ undermining the purity of its own power, a painting full of the good and
bad nature of an after-thought that embroils us in an unlikely realism.

Whenever the nature of artistic work is currently mentioned there is a temptation to discuss it
in Marxist terms, in terms of Labour’s subsumption to capital. While not dismissing the
relevance of such analysis what I’m getting at is the sense that this work, these oil paintings,
and the funny fgures that they stage, appear to come from nowhere, that they appear,
unasked, as a kind of surprise on the edge of such necessary materialist drama. This is the
other space that they create, and it seems to be a space that is born in the midst of her work,
on the margins of her theatre of artistic production, on the margins of a body of work that
realises the question of labour most dramatically as a kind of make-believe knitting. It is a
created creative space, a kind of wayward and involving appearance on the edge of things, an
uninvited and unnecessary event on the edge of her own ‘work’ that puts me, at least, in mind
of Franz Kafka as he generated devastating literary amusements in the margins of his
responsible day job. Just like Kafka, Roche, at the end of the day, is minded to inclusively
assemble the whole of her horizon, and all its working and non-working parts, into her work
as a whole. And, again like the Czech writer, we inhabit the whole of it through an experience
of each part.