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

Event: Collateral Readings (Language-based Artistic Research)


The first official gathering of the Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group of Language-based Artistic Research, took place prior to the Society of Artistic Research Conference 2021, for celebrating with the recent launch of Practice Sharing, an online presentation of expanded approaches to language-based practice within the field of artistic research. The first Practice Sharing comprises over 70 individuals and collaborations from a broad and transforming perspective to include diverse fields such as visual arts, performance, film, theatre, music, choreography as well as literature. 


For the event in April 2021, we invited a number of colleagues within the field of language-based artistic research to present their own individual ‘readings’ of the Practice Sharing material, drawing out different resonances and connections emerging through diving into this rich collection of practices. These diverse readings provide a context for opening up a wider informal discussion, for reflecting on broader issues and questions concerning language-based artistic research and the future direction of the Special Interest Group. Readers include Rosie Heinrich, Brandon LaBelle, Monika Rinck, Imogen Stidworthy, Nathan Walker.

 

The collateral readings can be encountered here