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

Event: Who will go to art school?

Who Will Go To Art School?
Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2015
24 September 2015, 6.30 - 8.30
New Art Exchange, Nottingham

 Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2015 will launch in Nottingham across artist-led spaces Backlit, One Thoresby Street and Primary, supported by an additional programme of events at Nottingham Contemporary, New Art Exchange and Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery. 


Discussion about the future of arts education and the proliferation of alternative art schools. Asking, who in the current economic climate has access to arts education and learning? Speakers: Emma Cocker (Reader in Fine Art, NTU), Anna Colin (Open School East), Paul Goodwin (Professor of Black Art & Design Studies, UAL), and Emily Pope (School of the Damned). Part of the public programme for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2015, selected by Hurvin Anderson, Jessie Flood-Paddock and Simon Starling, and hosted by the New Midland Group.

 Below is a version of my presentation: