Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. 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?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

Exhibition: WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION


Below are a series of images of my project 'Field Proposals' installed as part of the exhibition WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION, currently at The Pigeon Wing, London. 

‘Field Proposals’ are an ongoing attempt to map or give shape to the conceptual landscape of a practice, where the identification of specific coordinates fails to provide any coherent or definitive structure, instead only revealing further zones of indeterminacy. The work exists as a pairing of two proposals. The first uses the titles from existing work in an attempt to plot the coordinates of or establish the cartography of a practice, where intersecting lines suggest as-yet-unnamed possibilities that for now remain indiscernible. The second is largely blank, in further anticipation of this still to be navigated territory. The process of mapping does not lead to knowledge or understanding, but instead creates further uncertainty, drawing attention to areas (of the map) that are currently unknown, unexplored or unaccounted for.



More about the exhibition below
For their residency at The Pigeon Wing, VerySmallKitchen presents a month long exploration of how writing moves (or not) between the locations of WRITING/ EXHIBITION/ PUBLICATION. Throughout September The Pigeon Wing will be both workspace and exhibition, offering space for a programme of exhibitions, readings, performances, research projects, libraries, and screenings, exploring an abundance of forms and practices at the interface of writing and art practices.
Notes, essays, scripts, scores, propositions, live writings, scrawls, appropriations, assemblings and dissemblings, accretive structures and deletions are some of the strategies to be explored by a range of contemporary practitioners from the UK, Hungary, Ireland, the US and elsewhere. Throughout the exhibition, the gallery will also provide a focal point for the THE FESTIVAL OF NEARLY INVISIBLE PUBLISHING, a programme of self-organised events happening throughout the world, evidence of which are submitted to the gallery for archive and display.

The unfolding exhibition is organised around four key areas: WRITING LIVE, THE DEPARTMENT OF MICRO-POETICS, EXHIBITION/ PUBLICATION, and ASSEMBLING (the last presenting a remarkable exhibition-within-an-exhibition from Franticham/ Red Fox Press’s unique archive of rare assembling publications from 1970-2010). Whilst many artists have created texts and installations specifically for the space, others will produce work that unfolds at each of the live events, whilst further scores and contractual arrangements unfold at times not publicly announced. As part of Deptford X a final weekend will see artists working in the space leading up to a final performance event and feast. As well as opening and closing performance events, the schedule currently includes: Ignite and Reprise: Films by Matthew MacKissack, LemonMelon Publishing Seminar, DISSASSEMBLING CANNON by Phil Baber, Aphorism as Art Practice Study Afternoon, conversations with Simon Cutts and Francis van Maele and month long writing residencies from Press Free Press, Julia Calver, Hammam Aldouri (assistanted by Helen Kaplinsky) and Tamarin Norwood. See www.thepigoenwing.co.uk/events for full timetable of events as it develops.

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS:
Hammam Aldouri, 
Phil Baber
, Bagazine, 
Julia Calver
, Maurice Carlin, 
Anne Charnock
, Rachel Lois Clapham
, Emma Cocker, 
Simon Cutts, Matt Dalby, 
James Davies, 
Sonia Dermience, Karen Di Franco, Marianne Holm Hansen, Sarah Jacobs, Joy as Tiresome Vandalism, The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, Helen Kaplinsky, Márton Koppány, 
Freek Lomme/ Onomatopee, Matthew MacKissack, 
Marit Muenzberg/ LemonMelon, 
Tamarin Norwood, 
Pippa Koszerek, Mary Paterson, Press Free Press, Red Fox Press
 Colin Sackett, 
Seekers of Lice