Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. 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?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Event: Site/Off-Site/Non-Site

Wednesday 11 April, 10 – 12.00

Nottingham Trent University
Becky Beinart and Mat Trivett (Wasteland Twinning Project); Jennie Syson (Hinterland) and Emma Cocker (Urban Retreat / Manual for Marginal Places).
This lecture explores three different projects that deal with specific marginal sites as their point of provocation. Drawing on the experiences of these projects, invited speakers interrogate the critical and creative potential of the wastleand or 'edgeland', addressing notions of liminality, classification and questions around the social, ecological and cultural value of the marginal landscape.
Suggested Reading
Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Terrain Vague
Gil Doron … badlands, blank space, border vacuums, brown fields, conceptual Nevada, Dead Zones
Doina Petrescu, The Indeterminate Mapping of the Common