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.

Talk: Thinking Line/Performing Line

I have been invited to give a lecture at UWE, Bristol for the Department of Drawing and Applied Arts in March. 


Thinking Line/Performing Line
For artist-writer Emma Cocker, drawing is a practice capable of making visible or giving form to processes and occurrences that habitually remain hidden or unnoticed, that are experienced or felt (at the level of force or affect) rather than necessarily seen. Referring to her recent practice and the work of other artists, Cocker proposes to explore and perform the correlations between thinking and drawing alongside reflections on the performative ‘becoming line’ of drawings scored by and between bodies within the public realm. Less concerned with drawing as an observational record of the external world, Cocker reflects on drawing’s speculative and constitutive potential, and the possibility of critical subjectivity produced therein.


The lecture will draw on a series of texts that I have recently written that explore the speculative and constitutive potential of drawing including ‘Distancing the If and Then’ in Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, (ed.) (Springer, 2011) and ‘The Restless Line, Drawing’ in Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art (I. B. Tauris, 2012); as well as referring to ongoing research projects/enquiries such as Site (Sight) Lines (2010>) which explores the practice of throwing a glance as a form of performative drawing capable of constituting temporary collectivities or clusters of sociability.