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.

Text: Glimpsed, Only in Certain Light


The text below has been written in response to and in dialogue with the work of photographer Katja Hock, and will be published as part of her forthcoming exhibition Stille Fragmente at Djanogly Arts Gallery, Nottingham, September 2012. 

 The text explores the woodland as a specific spatial, temporal and conceptual site of indeterminacy, a liminal territory (or power) with the capacity to offer the receptive initiate glimpses of an anti-structural or subjunctive realm, in moments where a deep ‘vertical’ register of affective, mnemonic or even poetic experience ruptures the horizontal surface of appearances, the illusory reality of what is habitually seen. The text addresses the affirmative possibilities of indeterminacy, whilst exploring tactics for seeing what cannot be seen; the means by which a chance encounter with something glimpsed can nonetheless be prepared for.