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.

Publication: I AM NOT A POET: Assembling


I AM NOT A POET: Assembling was assembled and distributed by David Berridge (very small kitchen) at the Totalkunst Gallery, Edinburgh on August 21st 2011, as the conclusion of I AM NOT A POET. Participants in the show - which took place from 7-21st August - were invited to contribute an A4 sheet to a loose leaf b/w assemblage, whatever they wished to appear under the title of I AM NOT A POET.

With contributions from Magdalen Chua, Emma Cocker, Peter Cant & Alex Eisenberg, Jennie Guy, Colin Herd, Mirja Koponen, Shandra Lamaute, Michelle Letowska, Jow Lindsay, nick-e melville, Iain Morrison,  Marit Muenzberg, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, seekers of lice, Gerry Smith, Kim Walker, and Samantha Walton.






My video Close Reading (C.O.P.V., 1950) has also been selected for inclusion in the Winter Issue of ONandOnScreen and can be viewed here. ONandOnScreen is poems + videos. Here videos are linked with poems and poems with videos in a shared space, widening the spectrum and essential strangeness of each. ONandOnScreen is a conversation between moving words and moving images, 
on and on. ONandOnScreen is edited by poet and critic Thomas Devaney .

ONandONScreen’s fifth issue WINTER 2012 is now online. 

Featuring work by Joanna Fuhrman, Jena Osman, Farid Matuk, Cara Baldwin, Wayne Kosetenbaum, Catherine Wagner, David Lehman, Kevin Killian, Matt Hart, Jared Stanley, Gabie Strong, Lytle Shaw, Leonard Gontarek, Adam Fitzgerald, Chris Girard, Mark So. With additional videos by Zoe Strauss, Emma Cocker, Brendan Lorber, and mIEKAL aND.