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

Writing: Study Scores



I have been invited to contribute a text to a forthcoming publication produced in conjunction with a solo exhibition by artist Kayt Hughes. The exhibition is the culmination of a year long Fellowship awarded to Kayt as part of winning the prestigious Woon Sculpture Prize. A Nottingham Trent fine art graduate, Kayt won the prize for Study Scores, 2nd Movement (foreground in image above), a sculptural work inspired by playing of ‘wrong notes’ within musical improvisation. 

The new body of work developed during the Fellowship explores the similarities of sculpture making and a child’s investigation of the physical world. Hughes investigates materials’ properties with naivety, to extend their purpose and their potential to interact with one another. The objects make improvised gestures, with consideration to form, material and colour, constructing provisional and transitioning installations.