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. 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?, 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.

Publication and exhibition: Materials of Resistance


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My text ‘One Versed in the Alchemy of What If’ has been published in the exhibition catalogue accompanying Materials of Resistance by Clare Thornton at Plymouth Arts Centre. Exploring recurring themes and issues within Thornton’s work, the catalogue comprises contextual and experimental texts by writers/artists Phil Owen, Emma Cocker, Conor Wilson, Heike Roms and Natalie Raven. Designed by Jono Lewarne at City Edition Studio. An edition of 400 at £15 available here.

A monitor-based version of The Italic I (a body of work developed in collaboration with Clare Thornton) was also staged as part of Materials of Resistance. A review of the exhibition can be read here.