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.

Video: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis


Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker, Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, video still

Using processes of cross-reading and live drawing, Nikolaus Gansterer & Emma Cocker approach the publication Drawing a Hypothesis as a reader might thumb through the book; where certain sections appear to be lingered over, while others are skimmed in the search for key words and phrases, evocative fragments and extractions. Their reading suggests that books like Drawing a Hypothesis might not always need to be read in a linear or logical way, but rather are to be dipped into, allowing for detours and distractions within the event of diagrammatic reading itself. The lecture takes the figures of thought at the heart of Drawing a Hypothesis as points of departure for exploring and performing the correlations between thinking and drawing. Addressing the shifting and ambivalent properties of image, symbol and drawing within the publication, it asks, “how can these visual artefacts be comprehended?”


Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, Nikolaus Gansterer &Emma Cocker,
Documentation of a performance-lecture at M HKA, Antwerp

Video was commissioned and produced by M HKA
Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium
as part of the Graphology Project curated by Edwin Carels
Camera and editing:
Patrick Elliott

With text by A. Adam, Monika Bakke, Kerstin Bartels, Marc Boeckler, P. Brandlmayr, Emma Cocker, Gerhard Dirmoser, B. F. Fisher, Nikolaus Gansterer, Hanneke Grootenboer, Karin Harrasser, Helmut Leder, Katja Mayer, Ralo Mayer, Felix de Mendelssohn, M. L. Nardo, Christian Reder, Philippe Rekacewicz, Moira Roth, Andreas Schinner, Ferdinand Schmatz, section.a, Walter Seidl, Christina Stadlbauer, Axel Stockburger, Jane Tormey