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/Project: Not Ready Yet

Not Ready Yet
curated by Niki Russell

For the exhibition Not Ready Yet, Tomas Chaffe, Emma Cocker, Tom Godfrey and John Plowman explore the notion of 'willful irresolution', inhabiting an empty shop unit as a space in transition, between uses. Their inhabitation of the building proposes to rehearse a different use, exploring the gap between previous and future function, where the site is approached as no longer shop and not yet exhibition. Activities unfold physically and temporally within this space, punctuating the extant architecture of the building in ways that remain somewhat expectant rather than certain. A review of the exhibition can be read here.

Image: Emma Cocker, Oh, When (expectant archive)

Oh, When: a research residency and archive

As my contribution to Not Ready Yet, I am proposing to undertake a ‘residency’, using the exhibition as the ‘frame’ or ‘conditions’ within which to work. The extant architecture of the shop unit is approached as an empty or expectant structure, a thinking space for exploring the relationship between rehearsal and irresolution, for developing an emergent taxonomy of unreadiness, a nascent vocabulary to speak of the not-yet-ready. 


Image: Emma Cocker, Oh, When (field proposal). 

Different spaces within the exhibition will be used for different stages or aspects of the research; each space will be ‘set-up’ in anticipation of its related activity, arrangements of expectant furniture waiting to be animated or activated through future use. The residency will be structured through a series of overlapping phases of activity, which might vary in length, not necessarily corresponding to the weeks of the exhibition. The first phase (see documentation below) is one of 'making ready', where a team of 'research assistants' inhabit the project's production space, assembling the archival boxes for subsequent research. Further phases of activity will gradually unfold over the course of the exhibition. During my 'residency' I will be also archiving notes and documentation here.  








Image: Emma Cocker, Oh, When (production space). 
With thanks to 'research assistant' Chloe Morley.



Image: Emma Cocker, Oh, When (ellipsis).