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

Projects: drawing … walking … failing

I have recently been invited to participate in a number of proposed AHRC projects which in diverse ways extend some of the concerns emerging in my current research practice specifically in relation to failure, drawing and walking. These projects include the proposed research network bid 'The Art of Failure' (Laura Cull and Cormac Power); 'Oh how drawing thinks itself in me' (Helena Goldwater, Lucia King, Hester Reeve, Pak Keung Wan) and 'Walking Women' (Dee Hedden and Cathy Turner). More to follow as/when these projects develop.