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

Conference: Shipwreck

The full programme for the conference, The Semiotics of Shipwreck, at which I will be presenting a paper, is now online here. I am hoping that my paper will loop back through some of the ideas relating to failure that have been explored in other work.

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Detail from The Wreck of the East Indiaman 'Dutton' at Plymouth Sound, 1821, 
by Thomas Luny (oil on canvas) NMM Collection


"Shipwreck is the evidence of a failed performance; the remainder of an endeavour somehow prevented from reaching its goal (curiously describing both the event itself and its subsequent residue). It signals trajectory of action suspended part way through, a break or rupture in the timeline of a journey, progress stalled. Shipwreck is the site of an unfulfilled task, an unresolved quest, a mission left unfinished, incomplete or abandoned mid flow. In this paper, I want to address the motif of the shipwreck as a specific manifestation of failure – in turn, attempting to recuperate a critical, even affirmative, value therein; asserting that it is through its failing or irresolution, that the shipwreck remains a particularly potent motif for artists."