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. She was a key-researcher within the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) for exploring the thinking-feeling-knowing between choreography, drawing and writing. 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; 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.

Performance: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis (IV)


On 2 February 2012, Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker presented the fourth iteration of their performance lecture Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis at  (NGBK) New Society for Fine Arts, Berlin. Previous iterations of the lecture took place at (Part I) M HKA, Antwerp; (Part II) KNAW and (Part III) Kunsthalle Project Space, Vienna. The performance lecture was in conjunction with a book launch of Drawing a Hypothesis : Figures of Thought (ed. Nikolaus Gansterer, Springer, 2011) and also On the Materiality of Diagrams (Materialität der Diagramme) by Berlin based scholar, Susanne Leeb (see below).


Images: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, documentation from a performance-lecture at NGBK, Berlin, 
Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker. Photography: Simona Koch.