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

Publication: Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art



My essay, The Restless Line, Drawing has been published in Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art (eds.) Phil Sawdon and Russell Marshall (I.B.Tauris, 2012)

In this follow-up to 2007’s Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art, Phil Sawdon and Russell Marshall, directors of TRACEY, curate contemporary drawing within fine art practice from 2006 through to 2010. Four essays and images from 33 international artists collectively explore the boundaries of the Hyperdrawing space, investigating in essence what lies beyond drawing – images that use traditional materials or subjects whilst also pushing beyond the traditional, employing sound, light, time, space and technology. Over and above traditional views and practices, the authors and artists in this book recognise and embrace the opportunities inherent in the essential ambiguity of drawing. Practitioners of hyperreal works, 2d 3d 4d pieces and installations that push beyond photorealism all find their place within this new conception of Hyperdrawing as techné, a productive space no longer limited by spatial boundaries. Artists including Catherine Bertola, Layla Curtis, Richard Grayson, Karl Haendel, Garrett Phelan, Suzanne Treister and Ulrich Vogl alongside the essays of Emma Cocker, Siún Hanrahan, Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon/Russell Marshall provide a contemporary view in both visual and written form that propose ambiguity as a strategic approach in drawing research and practice.