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

Text Work: Field Proposals (part 1 and part 2)

Below are a set of new 'Field proposals' which I am currently developing for a number of different exhibition contexts including Writing/Exhibition/Publication at The Pigeon Wing, London; The Department of Micropoetics curated by David Berridge and Your Future Needs You at Art Gene, Barrow-in-Furness.  

     
        
Image: Field Proposal (2) for The Pigeon Wing

Field Proposal (2) is proposition for a portable studio, the diagramming of a thinking space. The work exists as a pairing of two proposals. Part 1 uses titles from existing work in an attempt to plot the coordinates of or establish the cartography of a practice, where intersecting lines suggest the potential of as yet unnamed possibilities which for now remain indiscernible. Part 2 is largely blank, in further anticipation of this still to be navigated territory.