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

Collaboration: Tacturiency (at Summer Lodge)

Below are images from Tacturiency (a collaborative project that I am developing with Clare Thornton) produced in the context of a one-week 'residency' at Summer Lodge, NTU, 2012, with the excellent support/involvement of intern, Christine Stevens. Further documentation of Tacturiency at Summer Lodge can be found here. 

In Games of Resonance, Cocker and Thornton appear as operatives engaged in a series of opaque or ambiguous tasks, whose visual poetics reside somewhere between séance and shiftwork. The table becomes a conversational space for playing out the productive frictions and desired points of difficulty within collaboration, performed through a visual/gestural language that is heightened yet economic, minimal yet baroque.


Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, Game of Resonance (Soul Partition), 2012
Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, Game of Resonance (Soul Partition), 2012



Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, Game of Resonance (Torque of Collaboration), 2012
Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, Game of Resonance (Torque of Collaboration), 2012