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

New research project: Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line



The interdisciplinary research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 - 2016), led by artist Nikolaus Gansterer (Austria/Vienna) in collaboration with choreographer-dancer Mariella Greil (Austria/Vienna) and artist-writer Emma Cocker (UK/Nottingham), in dialogue with a team of international critical interlocutors was approved funded by the FWF PEEK research grant of Austria. With ‘arts-based research’ at its heart, this research project stages an inter-subjective encounter between drawing (Gansterer), choreography (Greil) and writing (Cocker) in order to a) investigate those forms of ‘thinking-feeling-knowing’ produced through collaborative, interdisciplinary exchange, ‘between the lines’ of drawing, dance and writing, b) explore the performativity of notation (figures of thought, speech and movement) for articulating and making tangible this enquiry, c) contribute new knowledge and understanding to debates about the specificity of artistic enquiry and expanded practices of drawing, dance and writing.The project explores the nature of ‘thinking-in-action’ or ‘figures of thought’ produced as the practices of drawing, choreography and writing enter into dialogue, overlap and collide. Through processes of reciprocal exchange, dialogue and negotiation between the key researchers, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line will interrogate the interstitial processes, practices and knowledge(s) produced in the ‘deviation’ for example, from page to performance, from word to mark, from line to action, from modes of flat image making towards transformational embodied encounters.

 Key researchers:

Nikolaus Gansterer (University of Applied Arts / Vienna / Austria)
Mariella Greil (PhD candidate at University of Roehampton / London / UK)
Emma Cocker (Nottingham Trent University / Nottingham / UK)
Sputniks:
Christine de Smedt (Parts / Brussels)
Lilia Mestre (Apass / Brussels)
Alex Arteaga (UdK / Berlin)
Funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF – PEEK art-based research grant of Austria
Website (under construction): http://www.choreo-graphic-figures.net

Details about the project as it unfolds will also be archived here.

Research Collaboration: Beyond the Line (Part 1)


Between 2 - 7 December 2013, I was working in Vienna at WUK with artist Nikolaus Gansterer and choreographer Mariella Greil on the pilot phase of a project entitled Beyond the Line, developing a working methodology for exploring ideas around interdisciplinary collaboration. Beyond the Line was conceived as ‘test-bed’ for exploring collaborative methods for working between and beyond the disciplinary lines of drawing, dance and writing. Ideas and working processes emerging from Beyond the Line will be developed further as part of a 3-year collaborative research project between myself, Gansterer and Greil entitled Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line 2014 – 2017 (funded by the Austrian Program for Arts-based Research, PEEK).


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