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

Interview: Meaningful Meaninglessness

Below is a transcript from the 'in conversation' I had with artist Candice Jacobs at G39 in Cardiff. The text chimes with some of the ideas explored in my recent text, Without Rhyme or Reason on the work of Vlatka Horvat. An edited version of the transcript will be appearing in a forthcoming issue of the Nottingham Visual Arts magazine. 


Image: Candice Jacobs, Sculpture made by crane driver using the crane and materials on site at 'Nottingham Contemporary' and documented from the cab of the crane by the crane driver using his mobile phone, (2008)

Meaningful Meaninglessness