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

Dialogue: Pause/Proximity/Gesture

Image: Marianne Holm Hansen

Gesture/ Pause/ Proximity

Conversations between invited groups of artists, writers, performers, psychotherapists and architects to discuss and collectively explore notions of Gesture/ Pause/ Proximity in general, Pause and Silence in particular, from within diverse practices and disciplines.

 

I was invited to participate in a series of conversations as part of a research and development project called Gesture/ Pause/ Proximity (November 2019 – November 2020), by artist Marianne Holm Hansen and curator/producer Orlagh Woods, to explore to what extent a greater awareness of non-verbal communication may enable us to develop more inclusive conversations [and, eventually, spaces for that conversation to take place].

 

The wider project, Gesture/ Pause/ Proximity, emerges from previous works and collaborations, as well as a shared and ongoing desire for practices that engage groups and individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds in equal and meaningful discussions. It aims to connect art, science and lived experience to question if, then how, a knowing and creative use of gesture, pause and proximity - in conversation and as conversation - may enable us to accommodate differing language skills, overcome language barriers and establish forms of dialogue that disrupt or resist hierarchies of speech, status and power.


More about the project Gesture/ Pause/ Proximity here