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

Presentation: Writing in Dialogue with, Parallel to and as Practice.


I have been invited by Natalija Subotincic, Professor of Architecture, University of Mantoba, WInnipeg, Canada, to present a lecture within the context of a seminar programme on Critical Written Reflection that she is leading at Aarhus School of Architecture.

 9th October 2014
Aarhus School of Architecture
Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Denmark

 On Not Knowing: Writing in Dialogue with, Parallel to and as Practice.
With reference to ideas emerging from her text ‘Preparing for the Unexpected: Tactics of Not Knowing’ published in On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (2013), in this lecture writer-artist Emma Cocker will explore various approaches to writing in dialogue with, parallel to and as practice. Drawing on practice-based and theoretical research, Cocker will introduce and elaborate different ways of using language in relation to and as practice, advocating the idea of writing as a creative and material practice, alongside the critical potential of poetic and performative modes of exposition. Specific examples of practice will be situated in relation to various models of contemporary writing/practice – including performance writing, art-writing and the development of the artistic research model of expositional writing.