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.

Research Collaboration: Beyond the Line (Part 2)


Beyond the Line
Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil
Bonington Gallery, Nottingham
11 – 17 April 2014



 In April, I will be collaboratively developing the 2nd phase of the pilot project Beyond the Line in Bonington Gallery, Nottingham. Beyond the Line is an international, interdisciplinary collaboration involving artist-writer Emma Cocker, artist Nikolaus Gansterer (Vienna) and choreographer Mariella Greil (Vienna), for exploring the points of slippage as the practices of drawing, dance and writing enter into dialogue, overlap and collide. Cocker, Gansterer and Greil will inhabit Bonington Gallery as an experimental ‘method laboratory’ for staging an encounter between choreography, drawing and writing; between body, mark and text. 



Beyond the Line is 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 Cocker, Gansterer and Greil entitled Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line 2014 – 2017 (funded by the Austrian Program for Arts-based Research, PEEK). Glimpses of the unfolding ‘method laboratory’ will be made possible through a live-feed video stream that can be viewed in Bonington foyer. The ‘laboratory’ will also be open to the public at scheduled times where the artists will be ‘in-residence’ to share their working processes. Images - from Beyond the Line (Part 1), WUK, Vienna, December 2013