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

Book Launch: The Event


Excerpt from my essay, [...]


As part of THE EVENT in Birmingham, Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry will be launching their new publication alongside the opening of the group exhibition “which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together?”. The publication (developed in response to a series of evolving solo commissions by Kihlberg Henry, produced by VIVID in collaboration with Danielle Arnaud and Artsway) includes texts by Emma Cocker, Brian Dillon and Mladen Dolar.