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.

Writing: Unwork




I am currently developing ideas for some new writing working with and around the idea of unwork.
Developing my approach from within recent writing (such as The Yes of the No!, Permission Granted and Room for Manoeuvre) I propose to explore the idea of unwork through a specifically semantic, as much as conceptual or theoretical line of enquiry. I am envisaging that the notion of unwork might be unraveled according to a number of ideas that could include:
- Unwork as a form of resistant or dissonant non-production or deviation of resources – a reversal, inversion, subversion, reworking of work’s time, specifically drawing on Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘la perruque’.
- Unwork as a term to describe or account for those forms of labour that refuse, resist, or otherwise fail to be easily classified as work (specifically in relation to notion of economic exchange) – the idea of vocation (including forms of spiritual labour); the figure of the volunteer, the amateur, the guardian, the player … duty of care ... labour of love … the relation of living to working (inherent in the term livelihood); ideas around the relation of meaning, meaningfulness, meaninglessness and work/unwork.
- Unwork in ‘palindromic’ relation to work where the work/unwork pairing is conceived as one of doing and undoing, making and unmaking. I am interested in exploring a shift from thinking about Sisyphean forms of labour (based on the mythic/absurd model of failure and repetition) which I have explored elsewhere (see Over and Over Again and Again) towards a form of Penelopian labour (the resistance inherent in the practice of doing/undoing, of refusing work’s closure or completion, by drawing on the mythic figure of the weaver/unweaver Penelope).
- From unwork to unworkable: something in the word unworkable which speaks of both redundancy and impotency (unemployment) at the same time as a kind of wildness (a utopian desire even?), something existing in excess of what is considered workable, utilitarian, practical, possible.


Various texts and artistic practices are functioning as interlocutors or provocateurs for considering these ideas: Simone Weil's writing on duty, labour, training; Michel de Certeau's The Practices of Everyday Life; Lars Svendsen's dual texts on Boredom and Work; Michael Hardt on Affective Labour; artist Walter de Maria's Meaningless Work and Boxes for Meaningless Work; Pilvi Takala's The Trainee; Tacita Dean's The Presentation Sisters; Vlatka Horvat's This Here and That There; work by Cool and Balducci; Francis Alys' Bolero (Shoe Shine Blues) and other work in relation to rehearsal; work by Hanne Darboven; Cummings and Lewandoska's Enthusiasm (arranged into the categories of Love, Labour, Longing) 


These ideas were initially presented in response to an invitation from SCAF (Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum) to develop a position statement in relation to the next Sheffield Art Sheffield (2013), specifically exploring potential threads or links between the previous two festivals, ArtSheffield08, Yes No and Other Options (curated by Jan Verwoert) and ArtSheffield10, Life: A Users Manual (curated by Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher).