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: Not Ready Yet





I have been invited to be part of an exhibition curated by Niki Russell entitled Not Ready Yet. 

Not ready yet

Tomas Chaffe, Emma Cocker, Tom Godfrey, John Plowman

16th January -  6th February 2011


This project acts in a form of 'willful irresolution'; it is not made ready in advance for a particular purpose. Housed within the extant architecture of the shop unit, this is a space in transition, between uses, and bearing its previous form before this is ripped out and re-fitted. We inhabit this space and rehearse a use, that is neither shop nor exhibition, but between uses. Physically and temporally they unfold within this space. Taped windows, a corridor, the option to go downstairs, 84 potential archives, removed mirrors and doors, newly installed 'cubicles', framed documents not quite complete, the option to return to the space later to access further parts of the space. Individual¹s presence, potential readings and objects weave together, and punctuate the space in different ways. There is an exchange of roles and practical purpose within the space. An ongoing expectancy provides the conditions of the project: expectancy that access provides something, expectancy of closure, expectancy that the shop might explode.



Not ready yet is curated by Niki Russell, and is the final chapter in a series of exhibitions and events in The Exchange Building, entitled 'Nottingham Studios Presents'


Preview Sunday 16th January 2011 14:00-17:00

Opening times Wednesday - Saturday 12:00 - 18:00 & Sunday 12:00 - 17:00

Location: 5 Smithy Row, The Exchange Building, Nottingham NG1 2DD



I am hoping that this might provide a context for further exploring certain ideas that have been emerging in recent projects around rehearsal, (un)timeliness, (un)readiness, futurity, kairos.

Proposal for Not Ready Yet

Oh, When: a research residency and archive
The extant architecture of a disused shop unit is approached as an empty or expectant structure, a thinking space for exploring the relationship between rehearsal and irresolution, for developing a nascent vocabulary to speak of the not-yet-ready. Redundant or disused shelves and storage units are considered as a found archival system, into which a not-yet-known body of research is called or invited. A research residency is proposed within the time-space of an exhibition, the details of which remain undeclared or unspecified; its direction unfolding only as the exhibition evolves. 

The attempt to archive or account for something that remains willfully unresolved or unready necessarily emerges as a somewhat absurd, impossible or endless task. Henri Lefebvre asks, “How many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents?” For the shifting terrain of 'unreadiness' or 'irresolution', the number of maps must necessarily remain infinite. 

More to follow soon.