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.

Event: Extra Curricular

I have been invited as a guest writer/reader as part of the project Extra Curricular at Spike Island. For Extra Curricular selected writers/artists/curators have been invited to suggest a text that they are currently reading or, equally, one they have read many times and frequently reference in their practice – whether theory, fiction, manifesto or any other form of 'text' – which will be used as the basis for a reading group seminar. I am not yet sure what text to propose – maybe something by Victor Turner (whose writing on ritual and liminality I have been returning to as part of my research for a book chapter for the publication Liminal Landscapes), or perhaps something in relation to productive knowledge or techne (with its attendant form of timing <kairos> and cunning intelligence <metis>)?