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

Event: S1 Assembly

I will be chairing this event at S1 Artspace on Saturday 5th February 2011. 

S1 Artspace presents S1 Assembly on Saturday 5th February 2011, which concludes S1’s anniversary project FIFTEEN and launch of the new premises with a day of discussions, presentations, screenings and events that aim to reflect on the history, evolution and role of artist-led activity and the questions and issues facing artist-led activity today

S1 Assembly has been organised through dialogue amongst the S1 Studio Committee and will be based around four key areas of discussion: WHY/WHAT/HOW artist led activity, COMING OF AGE – how to move on without settling sown, TESTING SPACE and BEYOND SPACE – DIY, association and collectivity. Areas called into question include  the history of artist led activity as dissent, resisting institututionalization, models and aims of artist-led activity, creative ecologies, the relation of artist led space to wider ecology of city, the significance of the studio within contemporary practices as spaces of risk and speculation and the role of sociality in networks.

The event will include contributions from Neil Mulholland, Rebecca Fortnum, James Shorthose, Candice Jacobs (MOOT), Jim Prevett (Space), Megan Wakefield, Andy Abbott, Julie Westerman, Haroon Mirza, Thom O’Nions (The Woodmill) Megan Wakefield, Niki Russell (Reactor), (Tether) and The Royal Standard plus other speakers to be confirmed, and will be chaired Emma Cocker, a writer, Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University and S1 Studio holder. 

S1 Assembly aims to provide a platform for networking and will include a chance to view the FIFTEEN exhibition, look around S1’s studios and a temporary library made up of material contributed by artist-led groups and organisations across the country. A buffet lunch and cakes will be provided, followed by curry and drinks after the event, all contributed by S1 studio holders.