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: Process & Repetition - Hanne Darboven and Raphael Hefti



Sunrise/Sunset (installation view), 1984
385 sheets of paper, felt pen, postcards. 
Courtesy Camden Arts Centre and Konrad Fischer Galerie
I have been invited to introduce the forthcoming exhibitions by Hanne Darboven and Raphael Hefti at Camden Arts Centre, 20 January 2012 - 18 March 2012. Involving a dialogue with Raphael Hefti, the introduction will explore connections and points of resonance between the two artists’ work (as well as drawing on some of the ideas underpinning my own research including texts such as Over and Over Again and Again). This will be the first solo exhibition by Darboven in the UK and will feature a number of her large scale serial works which focus on the passage and structuring of time. These vast installations are formed of hand drawn notations and numbers, musical scores and texts which are sometimes accompanied by images and objects. It will also be Hefti’s first solo show in the UK and in this new work he will approach his investigations from a specific tangent: discovering mistakes in industrial processes and pushing them to a limit where aesthetic transformations take place.