Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. 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?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship

The Berwick Gymnasium Fellowships: An Archival Record
Commissioned essays for forthcoming publication (Spring 2008)

Celebrating twelve years of operation, The Berwick Gymnasium Fellowships- an archival record, recently published, is the first English Heritage publication to feature work from their contemporary arts programme. Delivered in partnership with Art Editions North, the 160-page publication is rich with images from the original artists’ exhibitions along with essays by commissioned writers and interviews with the artists.
Image: Fiona Crisp

Extending from research that questions how the gallery space might be framed as a space of transitivity and contingency, I have been commissioned to write three essays (on Annie Cattrell, Fiona Crisp and Justin Carter) for the Art Editions North/ English Heritage publication on artists who have undertaken one of the Berwick Gymnasium Fellowships that are open to international artists. The publication intends to examine the outcomes and impact of the Fellowship, based on interviews with the artists. The writing specifically relates to the artist’s experience of the Fellowship and the work produced, but also in relation to how the gallery space or commissioning process might respond to or support practices which are open-ended or developmental, or which examine the thematic notions of the threshold and liminality. Each essay refers obliquely to the indeterminate border status of Berwick and also discusses how the practices articulate threshold or transitional perspectives on their subject matter. This writing extends ideas developed in other earlier essays and papers which have examined practice which explore the notion of the threshold; as well as the idea of practice as a performative process and the contingent nature of the gallery

Publisher: Art Editions North
ISBN-10: 0955747813
ISBN-13: 978-0955747816