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. She was a key-researcher within the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) for exploring the thinking-feeling-knowing between choreography, drawing and writing. 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; 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.

Project: Point Line Time - drawing and the site of the page



I have been invited to contribute to POINT LINE TIME - a drawing research project led by artist and writer Tamarin Norwood. 

POINT LINE TIME is a drawing research project led by artist and writer Tamarin Norwood through a 12-month residency at Spike Island, Bristol. The residency project aims to examine the spatial and temporal attributes of the drawing process — the space and the time around the page — in terms of their relationship to the object of drawing, the subject or body doing the drawing, and the body of marks left on the page. This research will develop through studio-based experiments that engage with the expanded field of drawing, moving beyond the pencil and the page towards towards three-dimensional and four-dimensional reinterpretations of the point of contact between drawing instrument and support. Implicit in this studio-based approach to research is a belief that genuinely new insight can be reached by means of a "blind" and "groping" (Derrida 1990) movement through a breadth of focused activity, each point of experimentation leading to the next without a given end in sight. This attitude of (knowing?) "not-knowingness" (Fisher and Fortnum 2013) has much in common with the particular myopic or groping 'eye' of the pencil lead, which is continually in movement at the point of drawing and is too close to the page to 'see' the configuration of marks it leaves on the surface. Writing and linguistic representation form a substantial component of the project: the diverse ways in which writing creates, describes and represents exist in counterpoint to the diverse ways in which drawing creates, describes and represents. Likewise as the pencil gropes along the surface of the page in drawing so too, quite differently, does the pen grope along the surface of the page in writing. These near-parallels will inform the structure of the residency, as material experiments seek near-equivalence in textual experiments, and as the project as a whole informs the writing of an extended text exploring the surface of the page in drawing and writing. Studio research will take place in dialogue with an interdisciplinary network of researchers and practitioners spanning the fields of sign language, choreography, poetry, geography, additivism, acoustics and composition, each field bringing a new inflection to the space and time around the page. Details of contributors, and how aspects of our conversations and collaborations will be made public, are here. Contributors include Morehshin Allahyari, Emma Cocker, Antonia Barnett-McIntosh, Martina Conti, Daniela Cascella, Kyra Pollitt, Tom Chivers, Daniel Rourke