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.

Event: Strategies for Approaching Repeating Problems


Emma Cocker & Rachel Lois Clapham, Fatima Hellberg, Gil Leung, Andrew McGettigan, Francesco Pedraglio, David Raymond Conroy, Alex Vasudevan

Re — Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, presented at Quad, 2012


Strategies for approaching repeating problems presented a series of performances, presentations and talks around the ideas explored in the exhibition, Accidentally on Purpose, at Quad. Taking the notion of a repeating problem as a starting point, invited artists, writers and curators discussed elements of their practice within this framework. Notions of recurring issues were explored from artistic and wider social perspectives; from difficulties inherent in language and communication; to the way artists and writers position themselves in relation to political events and wider social issues.

Re — Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, presented at Quad, 2012

 For Strategies for approaching repeating problems, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker performed a new version of Re — an ongoing iterative project that essays the relation between meaning and intention, hesitation and purpose, and the visible and invisible states of not knowing within the event of practice. Re —  presses on two writers coming together to explore process, product and performance (of text).