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.

Book chapter: The Cartographical Necessity of Exile

My proposed essay 'Exit Strategies – The Cartography of Escape' has been invited into the next stage of submissions for the publication, THE CARTOGRAPHICAL NECESSITY OF EXILE (ed.) Karen Elizabeth Bishop (Harvard University).

Background to the Publication.
Derek Walcott identified a cartographical necessity of exile in his 1984 collection of poetry, Midsummer, when he wrote:
So, however far you have travelled, your
steps make more holes and the mesh is multiplied –
… exiles must make their own maps
This collection will seek to understand this cartographical imperative. What is the relationship between exile – understood broadly in its most modern, splintered sense to include external and internal exile, diaspora, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, expatriation, migrants, refugees, nomads, the disappeared and the ex-disappeared – and map-making? Mapping is a certain science that enables emplacement and facilitates movement. Yet it can also be an aesthetic project that draws on a heightened awareness of space and place, memory, and historical imaginary. So what kinds of maps do exiles make? Are they private maps or maps that can be shared? How are they conceived of and how are they read? How do they provide for new ways of thinking about the experience of exile? How do authors writing in or about exile represent the doubly ontological and epistemological exercise of map-making? And how, finally, might a cartographical necessity of exile challenge how we conceive of mapping, its history and future, its function, tools, and media?