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

Exhibition/Project: Your Future Needs You

I will be including a new version from the ongoing series Field Proposals in the forthcoming exhibition, Your Future Needs You, at Art Gene in Barrow-in-Furness. This work will also be developed through a new performative mapping staged as a live or unfolding event within the space of the gallery, which responds to the specific geographical and conceptual terrain encountered during a series of visits to the area. This mapping will also operate as a working model or drawing board for a piece of new writing which responds more specifically to the Urban Retreat project that artist Sophie Mellor is undertaking in Barrow-in-Furness through September. More to follow as this project develops...

Field Proposal (Your Future Needs You), 2010