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.

Being in the Midst: Per-forming Thinking in Action


Over the coming weeks I am giving a series of invited lectures with the title Being in the Midst: Per-forming Thinking in Action. This is the title of a book that I am ‘in the midst’ of working on, and I will be approaching these lectures as a context for ‘thinking through’ this title in relation to some of my recent projects and collaborations:

* Wednesday 30 January, Lincoln School of Art and Design
* Monday 4 March, York St. John University
* Wednesday 13 March, Derby University

The title echoes that of a research article that I published in 2016, which explores the relation between 'performing thinking' in action and performing 'thinking-in-action'. See article here. The notion of 'thinking in action' has been a recurring motif my research and writing over the last decade, and will continue to be turned over and over (in different ways) within some of my forthcoming research projects. More on this soon.