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

Publication: To Have and To Hold



I have been invited to contribute a text to a forthcoming publication that expands on a project entitled To Have and to Hold, which was curated by NVA, a Scottish environmental arts organization, for the Venice Architectural Biennale, 2010. The Scottish Government & Creative Scotland in partnership with the British Council worked with NVA to represent Scotland at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. NVA’s contribution to the Biennale focused on a project that they are currently involved in at a site near Loch Lomond that includes a late-modernist ruin. Their involvement in the biennale was staged through a series of events aimed at provoking debate and discussion around the proposed redevelopment of this site.

More about the broader project here:

More about the the events in Venice here:

The proposed interdisciplinary publication will include invited contributions from architect Ed Hollis, geographer Hayden Lorimer, architect Henry McKeown, landscape designer Tilman Latz, Adam Sutherland from Grizedale Arts and myself. It is being organized and edited by Gerrie van Noord.