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

Exhibition: Accidentally on Purpose


I have been invited to contribute to the public programme of the exhibition, Accidentally on Purpose  (QUAD, Derby, 
July 27 - October 7 2012) curated by Candice Jacobs and Fay Nicolson.

An exhibition, online publication, audio project and symposium exploring the occurrence of repeating problems and strategies for (re)approaching them. 

The exhibition takes its title from an American Sitcom situated in the banality of the everyday. Its characters strive to make the best of an unfortunate situation; repetitively re-negotiating the uncertainty of their lives. The desire for escapism through the consumption of mass broadcasts and episodic formulae offers an interesting context for this exhibition; which connects the quotidian sitcom to an exploration into the relationship between success and failure, looking at common place materials, familiar situations and repetitious processes as a point of departure. Artists include: Becky Beasley, Karen Cunningham, Michael Dean, Cyprien Gaillard, Ryan Gander, Paul Graham, Jonathan Monk, Rose O’Gallivan, Edit Olderbolz, Clunie Reid, Dan Rees, George Shaw and Ryszard Wasko.


More to follow soon.