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.

Text-work: Field Proposals for an Indeterminate Place



I am currently developing a new version of Field Proposals as a site-responsive proposal for Barrow-in-Furness as part of the project Urban Retreat. This new work entitled Field Proposals for an Indeterminate Place (No Longer and Not Yet) responds to the specific geographical and conceptual terrain encountered during a series of visits to Barrow-in-Furness. This mapping will also operate as a working model or drawing board for a piece of new writing as part of the publication Manual for Marginal Places, a project developed by artist Sophie Mellor.