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

Publication: On Not Knowing: How Artists Think





The publication On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (eds.) Rebecca Fortnum and Elizabeth Fisher (Black Dog Publishing, 2013) to which I have contributed a text 'Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected' and two artist's pages (in collaboration with Clare Thornton and Rachel Lois Clapham respectively)  is now available here. 

How far does our openness to aesthetic experience, and new forms of knowledge, depend on our capacity to enter and indulge states of wonder and awe, doubt and failure, ignorance and play? How critical are these conditions to the creative process? How do artists invite the unknown into their creative practice? On Not Knowing brings together contemporary artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines to explore the role of ‘not knowing’ within the creative process. The state of ‘not knowing’ or engaging with the unknown is an important aspect of all research. For artists it is crucial, as the making process often balances a strong sense of direction with a more playful or meditative state of exploration and experimentation.
Contributions include:

Dennis Atkinson, Pedagogy of the Not Known
Phyllida Barlow (in conversation with Elizabeth Fisher), Unidentified Foreign Objects
Sonia Boyce and Sarah Cole in conversation, Gulp
Emma Cocker, Tactics for Not Knowing – Preparing for the Unexpected
Cornford & Cross, Mobilising Uncertainty
Elizabeth Fisher, In a Language You Don’t Understand
Rebecca Fortnum, Creative Accounting – Not Knowing in Talking and Making
Rachel Jones, On the Value of Not Knowing – Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be
Ian Kiaer, Studio
London Fieldworks, Towards the Reification of a Wandering Mind
Office of Experiments, On Being Overt- Secrecy and Covert Culture
Gary Peters, Ahead of the Yes and No – Heidegger on Not Knowing and Art
Jyrki Siukonen, Made in Silence? On Words and Bricolage
Andrew Warstat, Unteachable and Unlearnable, The Ignorance of Artists


 Image: Sarah Cole, Loving is Work, performance video documentation from A Million Minutes,  developed in collaboration with Islington Carer’s Centre, 2013. Camera and post-production: Karl Cresser. Courtesy of the artist.