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

Journal Article: Moves towards the Incomprehensible Wild



My article ‘Moves towards the Incomprehensible Wild’ is going to be published in a forthcoming issue of the online journal Art & Research,  focusing on the theme, Art & Animality.

 Image: Dutton + Swindells


The article explores how for artists, Dutton + Swindells, the notion of ‘encounter’ or ‘event’ emerges as a particular manifestation of wildness. Their practice investigates whether it is possible to every truly encounter (or indeed produce) something wild, something that has not been already captured, classified, tamed. Bringing Dutton + Swindells’ practice into the proximity of Alain Badiou’s conceptualization of the event, my intent is to explore how within their work the event (of an encounter with the wild) promises towards the possibility of the new whilst asking whether such an event could be provoked or produced through a form of critical (artistic) practice.

Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild
The article will be published in Art & Animality, Volume 4 No 1 Autumn/Winter 2010
Co-edited by Ron Broglio

Contributors include:
Helen Bullard
Marcus Coates
Emma Cocker
Mark Dion
Susan McHugh and Steve Baker
Carolee Schneeman
Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir & Mark Wilson
Jan Verwoert
Frederick Young

Background 
Art & Research is an artist-led, internationally peer-assessed open access e-journal of Research in Fine Art Practice, focused upon questions, contexts and methodologies of artistic research and practice. Art & Research aims to serve professional artists and academics, curators and critics, artistic researchers, postgraduate and doctoral research students and undergraduates, and to inform current pedagogical thought in a global context. Art & Research welcomes submissions from artists, researchers, academics, critics and curators which seek to engage with all areas of research in Fine Art practice and/or pedagogy. Submissions may take the form of interviews, analytical or polemical essays as well as audio, visual or text-based artworks which seek to address issues in / or are the outcomes of research in Fine Art practice.