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: Tripwire - a journal of poetics


I have been invited to contribute to a forthcoming issue of Tripwire, a journal of poetics. Tripwire, a journal of poetics, is devoted to a counter-institutional exploration of radical and experimental modes of contemporary poetics, art, and cultural politics. The journal was founded in 1998 by Yedda Morrison and David Buuck. Six issues were published between 1998-2002, with a special supplement published in September 2004 for the RNC protests in New York. Current and back issues are available here and through Small Press Distribution.

Tripwire 8 * CITIES
Contributors: Anne Boyer, Cecily Nicholson, MB, DH, Amy Balkin, Kaia Sand & Daniela Molnar, Ryan Eckes, Kim Hyesoon, Zarina, Scott Sørli, Michael Woods, Lucky Pierre, Grupo de Arte Callejero (trans. MR translation collective), Jonas Staal & Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Emma Cocker, Nancy Popp, Gonzalo Millan (trans. Annegret Nill), Dambudzo Marechera, Lucy Parsons, and a special feature from Oakland, featuring Oki Sogumi, Jill Richards, Lara Durback, Wendy Trevino, Joshua Clover, Mayakov+sky Platform, Jasper Bernes, Emji Spero, Erika Staiti, Kate Robinson, and more. December 2014. Buy here.