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: Grafting / Propriety


I have been commissioned to write a new text for the publication Grafting Propriety: From Stitch to the Drawn Line, by Danica Maier (Black Dog Publishing, 2015). Grafting Propriety showcases the work of Maier whose artwork follows the domestic object and drawing, with a particular interest in stitch, textiles and the decorative. Using subtle slippages and moments of detail to transgress propriety the artist questions the role of the object as well as the role of women in relation to labour. Grafting Propriety explores how textile agendas can be addressed without the use of the material, for example how textile methodology can be recreated in drawing and the drawn stitched line. 

My text 'Sampler of Samplers: Repeating Repeats, Repeats', addresses various ideas around repetition. This research and writing has connections to the current work I am engaged in with Clare Thornton (as part of the project The Italic I, where we are currently working on a text entitled The Italic I: How Repeating Repeats - on the Differential and the Interval Between) and my involvement in the research project Weaving Codes / Coding Weaves where I am further investigating Penelopian labour. Below is a version of the text.