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

Project: Seers-in-Residence


From Where I Stand I Can See You
Traci Kelly and Rita Marhaug
Monday 7 January - Friday 8 February 2013
The Bonington Gallery, Nottingham

Traci Kelly and Rita Marhaug. Photograph: Bjarte Bjørkum
From Where I Stand I Can See You brings together two artists that investigate their own subjectivity in relation to social-political economies and corporeal boundaries. Through differing approaches each artist creates a shared language through mired and inky surfaces on skin and paper. By exhibiting solo works together Kelly and Marhaug are grappling to hold each other in view and create the context to embark on a collaborative project, whilst Kelly is in residency at USF Verftet, Bergen (April-June 2013).

Seers-in-Residence

The Seers-in Residence is a programme which will engage four researchers from Nottingham Trent University, drawn from across various departments and schools. They have been invited to interact with Traci Kelly’s mono print installation Feeling It For You (Perspective) to evoke their own practice and research interests.
Emma Cocker
Thursday 10 January, 10 am – 1 pm

Emma Cocker’s practice interrogates the critical potential of failure, uncertainty, boredom, hesitation, immobility and inconsistency by exploring models of practice and subjectivity that remain willfully open or unresolved.
Joanne Lee
Thursday 17 January, 10 am – 1 pm

Joanne Lee investigates the aesthetics of everyday urban life and explores the possibilities of the essay in textual and visual forms as a creative and critical entity.
Ben Judd
Wednesday 23 January, 2 pm – 5 pm

Ben Judd interacts with and creates alternative belief systems based on observations of social groups such as witches and Morris dancers, to which he remains paradoxically both close and distant, connected and disconnected.
Dr Simon Cross

Thursday 31 January 10 am – 1 pm

Simon Cross’ research engages with the representation and attending imagery of madness in the social sphere through historical and contemporary trajectories.