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.

Between wandering and waiting



            Image: Roman Ondak, Good Feelings in Good Times

I am in the process of further developing a phase of research activity that investigates the creative and critical value of forms of non-production within artistic and performance-based practice, and which will be used as a way of refocusing some of the ideas that have been emerging over the last few years within my practice. This research area is a distillation of a number of concerns emerging within my ongoing art-writing practice, Not Yet There. This broader enquiry explores how irresolution, uncertainty, disorientation and the process of ‘getting lost’ can be discussed as strategic conditions of artistic practice, by attempting the critical recuperation/interrogation of subjectively-felt experiences such as failure, deferral, disappointment, boredom, indecision, restlessness. 

Emerging from my own practice – and the questions/struggle therein – my research explores the critical value of those moments before a decision/resolution has been reached and the points at which ‘thinking’ is activated/provoked within practice. My practice is concerned with prolonging, emphasising and honouring this space of indeterminacy or potentiality in order to investigate the specific qualities of the critical ‘thinking’ that precedes – or might indeed be different to – ‘knowledge’. My work attempts to shift attention from the deliberate (directly purposeful) to the process of deliberation (care/weighing-up) insisting that purpose or meaning might not always be synonymous with the notion of achieving a ‘goal’.