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

* Periphery



A new text work of mine (part of which is shown below) is going to be included as part of a limited edition journal/publication entitled *Periphery, which is the first project by YH485 Press. The work specifically explores the notion of the periphery in relation to the idea of 'footnotes', drawing on work undertaken as part of my collaboration with Open City, where footnotes have been explored for their capacity to break or slow down the experience of reading, by creating obstacles or sending the reader into the margins.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Image: extract from 'Pay Attention to the Footnotes'

Artists included in *periphery are: On the Edge Research, Jeremy Miller, Alice Carey, Mike Pearson, Rosemary Shirley, Duncan Higgins, Joanne Lee, Lawrence Bradby, Evi Grigolopoulou, Ann Churcher Clarke, Emma Cocker, Ian Hunter, Jo Robertson, Jonny Aldous, Lee Triming, Andrew Pepper, S Mark Gubb, Jennie Syson, Georgina Barnley, David Berridge/Hyun Jin Cho/David Johnson/Pippa Koszerek, Dean Kenning, Exocet, John Plowman, My Villages, Bruce Ayling, Theo Turpin/Frederico Campagna, Fiona Woods, David Reid/Fiona Maclaren, John Newling, Kathleen Coessens/Marie-Francoise Plissart.

YH485 Press is an independent publishing organisation conceived in March 2009 by Aaron Juneau, Jonathan Watts and Glen Jamieson.


Telling Stories: Countering Narrative in Art, Theory and Film 


My essay 'Not Yet There: Endless Searches and Irresolvable Quests' is now available within the publication:

Telling Stories: Countering Narrative in Art, Theory and Film 


Editor: Jane Tormey and Gillian Whiteley



Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0532-2


Isbn: 1-4438-0532-7


Trespassing disciplines and binding together practice and theory, Telling Stories: Visual Practice, Theories and Narrative crosses strange territories and occupies liminal spaces. It addresses a contemporary preoccupation with narrative and narration, which is being played out across the arts, humanities and beyond, and considers how visual and performative encounters contribute to thinking. How might they tell theories? Telling Stories results from a series of symposia, held at Loughborough University School of Art and Design in 2007. The programme included papers, screenings and performances and was based around the convenors’ shared interests in Peggy Phelan’s notion of ‘performative writing’ and in the examination of inter-disciplinary forms of narrative and counter-narrative. It specifically focused on three aspects - experimental forms of Theories and Criticism, Objects and Narrative and the particular form of the Cinematic Essay and explored how the performative move could also be said to apply to forms of contemporary art practice: to what photography, film, objects wish to say. This resulting edited collection presents contemporary making and writing practices as multi-faceted, interdisciplinary and trans-medial and is indicative of an attitude that sets out to encounter the world, its social conditions, its global perspectives and the nature of aesthetic discussion that is no longer confined by formalism.

More information can be found here

A sample PDF of the publication can be found here:




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