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.

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.