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: Ways to Wander


I will have a text-work included as part of the forthcoming publication Ways to Wander
: A Footwork [1] compendium of suggestions, instructions, rules and activities for walking. Edited by Claire Hind and Clare Qualmann (
Footwork/Walking Artists Network). More details to follow soon.

Ways to Wander
 - an interdisciplinary catalogue of ways to engage with walking from simple ideas to complex instructions, philosophical musings to playful encounters. Inspired by the multi-disciplinary approaches and experiences of the Footwork research group, and by Professor Carl Lavery’s ‘25 Instructions for Performance in Cities’ [2], this compendium aims to assemble a series of short texts that can be used to construct, interact with, or be encountered on a walk. The text may be for any location: urban, suburban or rural, or it could be site and/or route specific. Contributions may offer an improvised experience, or a more structured task. The context may be geological, environmental, historical, autobiographical, pedagogical, political, playful, spiritual, critical, or any combination of these.

[1] Footwork is a research group attached to the Walking Artists Network, 

[2] Lavery, C., 2005, ‘Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities.’ Studies in Theatre and Performance, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 229-238.