Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Transmission : Speaking and Listening Publication


From 2001 -5 I was one of the co-editors of the publication and lecture series, Transmission : Speaking and Listening Volumes 3 - 5, which is a collaboration between Site Gallery and Sheffield Hallam University. Volumes 3- 5 took up the themes Daily Encounters, Provenance / Inscription and Ornament and Utility/ Responsibility, inviting artists, curators and speakers from other disciplines to respond. the resulting discussions formed the basis of the publications. The publications listed below can be bought from www.cornerhouse.org/books/

Volume 5: Daily Encounters
http://cornerhouse.org/books/info.aspx?ID=1977&page=0
Editors Emma Cocker, Sharon Kivland, Jaspar Joseph Lester
Volume 5, the last in this series of publications developed from lecture series, addresses the habits and rituals shaping our everyday lives, and their relation with art. When taken out of the context of the everyday and made into works of art, those practices that we perceive as natural or real appear as constructed fabrications. In exploring the theme of daily encounters , artists and writers address the ways in which art may provoke and antagonize patterns of behaviour and systems of belief that often remain unquestioned. The contributors consider how works of art appropriate and re-deliver the naturalized and the everyday as a series of fictions and, in so doing, reflect the mechanisms and frameworks constructing our lives. Contributors include: Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Becky Shaw, Ryan Gander, Neal Rock, Imogen Stidworthy Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, Nayan Kulkarni, Mike Marshall, Carey Young, Dave Beech Robert Milin, Doug Fishbone, Richard Wentworth, Hewitt and Jordan, Malcolm Miles, Amanda Beech and Chris Oakley.

Transmission: Speaking and Listening. Vol. 4 Provenance / Inscription (ISBN 1899926666)
http://cornerhouse.org/books/info.aspx?ID=1725&page=0
Co-editors Emma Cocker, Sharon Kivland, Jaspar Joseph Lester
This is the fourth volume published from the annual series of lectures organised by Sheffield Hallam University and Showroom Cinema, which features leading and emerging artists and other practitioners discussing their works in relation to a particular theme. This volume takes up two themes: Provenance, which generally means the place of origin, and here takes on rather more complex meanings in relation to art and art objects, and the market or value systems that contain them; and Inscription, which addresses the reading of works of art, when they are produced as texts or incorporate text within them. Also included is a symposium on Inscription. The Transmission series makes a significant contribution in mapping current debates about contemporary art. Contributors: Gabriel Gbadamosi, Christopher Landoni, Goshka Macuga, Elizabeth Price, Nigel Cooke, Julian Walker, Nick Stewart, Steve Edwards, Simon Morris, Victor Burgin, Mark Titchner, ArtLab, C. Cullinan and J. Richards, Lucy Harrison, Brigid McLeer, Vera Dieterich and Caroline Rooney, Jane Rendell, Sally O’Reilly, Pavel Büchler

Speaking and Listening Volume 3, Ornament and Utility/ Responsibility (ISBN 1899926518)
http://cornerhouse.org/books/info.aspx?ID=1604&page=0
Co-editors Emma Cocker, Sharon Kivland, Lesley Sanderson
Transmission: Speaking and Listening is an annual series of lectures organised by the Fine Art Department at Sheffield Hallam University, in collaboration with Site Gallery. Leading and emerging artists from the UK and abroad discuss their work in relation to a particular theme with an audience of students and the public. The discussions, with examples of the artists’ work and specially commissioned essays, are published each year and make a significant contribution to current debate about artistic practice. This volume, the third in the series, takes up two themes: Ornament and Utility, which addresses the question of aesthetic judgement and the use (or usefulness) of a work of art; and Responsibility, which considers the ideology of artistic production.Contributors: Jananne Al-Ani, David Bate, Kate Blacker, Kathrin Böhm, Pavel Büchler, Conroy / Sanderson, Mikey Cuddihy, Eggebert-and-Gould, Dan Hays, David Mabb, Monica Oechsler, Simon Periton, Paul Rooney, George Shaw, Sarah Staton, Jemima Stehli, Essays by Jeanne Randolph and David Thorp