I will be delivering a research seminar in April, which I hope to use as a space to tease out (and talk through) some of the questions and issues that have emerged in recent work. In this seminar I propose to explore the connections and tensions between research and practice within my own work, in order to open up a discussion about the symbiotic and complex relationship between these different modes of working and thinking. The intent is use the concrete example provided by a series of recent projects (2009-10) as a context against which to provoke a conversation around ideas of method, knowledge and the dilemmas faced by the artist-researcher. Work referred to will include my ongoing collaboration with the project Open City, and a series of art-writing projects including a recent writing residency as part of The Summer of Dissent, at Plan 9 in Bristol. The seminar will also be marked by an informal launch of RITE, a publication bringing together the work of 19 art writers that enact expanded acts of criticism, question the essay form, use language as material and attempt to work the different ways that writing can be on or about new work.
- emma cocker
- 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