Pulp‘s Jarvis Cocker is set to curate a new art exhibition at Hepworth Wakefield alongside his wife Kim Sion – check out all the details below.
- READ MORE: Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker: “This is like going back to when you start a band”
Opening in May 2027, the show will bring together a personal selection of works that aim to challenge conventional ideas on what art can and should be, and will encourage attendees to nurture their own creativity.
When announcing the ‘Hodge Podge’ show, the Hepworth said it would invite “unlikely conversations and interesting encounters” between artists, including Jeremy Deller, Peter Doig, Barbara Hepworth, Klara Kristalova, Emma Kunz, Mark Leckey, and Agnes Pelton, as well as unknown outsider artists whose works have never featured in UK museums.
“We’ve chosen works that have stuck with us over the years,” Cocker told The Guardian of the show. “We’re trying to encourage people to realise that they have creativity within them.”
The museum has also said that the exhibition reflects the couple’s interest in alternative means of expression, class, and the way communities band together. Cocker explained that while it’s always been important that people express themselves, the ever-increasing automation of the creative industries meant it was “especially so now, when you can have other things to do it for you”.
“There’s no other alternative being espoused except capitalism,” he added. “And capitalism is all about consuming things and buying things. That’s how you prove your worth as a citizen. But we weren’t born as capitalists, we were born as creative creatures. We’re trying to take people back to the Garden of Eden, basically.”
Cocker and Sion will explore alternative spiritualities, psychedelia, fandom, dreams, poetry and music, and the exhibition also includes an immersive Dreamachine – a flickering light device co-invented by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville nack in the ’50s.
Designed to be viewed with closed eyes, it is intended to induce vivid visual patterns and altered states of consciousness.
“Everybody sees different things,” Cocker said of the device. “Gysin was apparently in the back of a car driving down an avenue with trees, and the sun shining through the trees made this kind of flickering effect and sent him into a funny state.”
Creative consultant Sion said when the couple met 18 years ago, their first conversation was about “living in the moment and being true to yourself”, adding that it was “such a big part of us”.
She also said she hoped that young people would visit next year, and reflecting on her own creative upbringing. “When I was a child, my father was hugely into contemporary art, and used to take me to the Camden Arts Centre and lots of exhibitions,” she said. “A lot of it wasn’t well-known or established artists, but I remember so many of the pieces.”
When Cocker discussed the need to creative rather than consume, he said it was the thing that separated humans from animals – [that] we’re able to look at the world and create things based on our experiences of it.”
On that note, Cocker had teased that Pulp “might write some more songs” together last year. The update came after his bandmates Nick Banks and Candida Doyle told NME that they were “not itching” to make another new album. “An EP, maybe, or a single,” Doyle added.
When pressed by NME on a proper follow-up to ‘More’, Cocker replied: “Maybe. We tried to not have a concept for this record or think, ‘This is it, this is our last gas’. I used to think that a lot.
“I had this weird thing that when an album was mixed and finished where I’d think, ‘Oh, I can die now and it would be OK’. That’s a terrible way to think about your life, really. I didn’t feel that with this record.”
