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

Writing: Cartographies of Escape

Over the last year I have been working on a number of interrelated book chapters as part of a cluster of research which I am entitling Cartographies of Escape. This cluster of research investigates how artistic practice can offer a platform for practicing or rehearsing alternative ‘ways of operating’ to the increasingly limited, prescriptive templates of citizenship perpetuated by and within contemporary neoliberalism. Chapters include 'Towards an Emergent Knowledge of the Margins' which is going to be published in the forthcoming Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation, (ed.) Eugenie Shinkle, (Ashgate Publishing, 2012); 'Border Crossings: Practices for Beating the Bounds', which will be published in Liminal Landscapes (eds.) Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts, (Routledge, 2012) and 'Looking for Loopholes- The Cartography of Escape' which will be published in The Cartographical Necessity of Exile, (ed.) Karen Bishop, which attempts to conceive of a form of elective exile manifesting as a search for (temporal) loopholes or moments of porosity within a given system or structure. More on these publications soon.