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?
- emma cocker
- 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