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

Exhibition: Documents, Alternatives


Documents, Alternatives
18 January  – 24 February 2018
Verge Gallery, Sydney, Australia


Angela Bartram, Andrew Bracey, David Brazier and Kelda Free, Luce Choules, Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, Kate Corder, Steve Dutton, Tim Etchells, Rochelle Haley, Morrad + McArthur, Andrew Pepper, and Louise K. Wilson
Curated by Angela Bartram

Documents, Alternatives is a (re-)staging of ephemeral artworks that is in ‘motion’ and responsive to intent. The exhibition foregrounds fluidity and diversity of translation and includes multiple art voices and modes of output including video, holography, text, painting, print and sound. This is an experimental, discursive strategy whereby the document becomes a new artwork and the artwork becomes a new document to keep the ephemeral evolving and in transition.