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.

Events: Writing/Performance


I will be participating in a series of LADA Study Room Sessions (organised by Maddie Costa, Diana Damian and Mary Paterson) that aim to explore, rethink and rename a writing practice that emerges from performance. This writing might be in tension with performance, or in conversation, or might forget it altogether. It is loosely associated with criticism, documentation, poetry and conceptual art, and might be all or none of these things. We don’t have a history for it, although it is rooted in traditions. We don’t have a place for it, although it appears everywhere. We don’t have a name for it, but could christen it with you. The three events, organised in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency, will approach this writing from three directions: How do we write? Who do we write for? What comes next?