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: Where does thinking/making happen?



Presentation as part of an event Studio/Situation, where members of the fine art team at Nottingham Trent University were invited to respond to the question, “Where does making & thinking happen within my practice?” or else perhaps ‘Where is my studio?” Building on recent discourses examining the role of both studios and situations within contemporary art practice, the event examined different perspectives and strategies relating to where (and how) artists make and think.
As part of this presentation, I addressed the important of my own studio as a space for endless reassembly, making and unmaking, where ideas are never resolved as such but endlessly revisited and rewoven. 

I am interested in Penelopian labour (the weave and unweave of a practice) - the doing and undoing; the holding of ideas together, and their disassembly, recombination. For me, studio is where piles of books are endlessly resorted, re-stacked, a place for shuffling ideas and works. Studio thinking is unfixed, an ever-turning over; always dissolving or collapsing before it ever gets too certain or sure. Once again, I return to a quote from Luce Irigaray when I think of my own use of a studio, where the search seems less for fixed and definite 'thoughts' and 'forms', but rather for that illusive "'other meaning' which is constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming fixed, immobilised".