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

Seminars: SENSE + Writing as Artistic Research


From 7 - 12 March 2022, I was an invited by Mika Elo (Professor of Artistic Research and the Head of the Doctoral program in Fine Arts) as a guest contributor to a week-long PhD intensive at UniArts, Helsinki. My programme of activity included 8.2.2022: Invited by Annette Arlander (Professor in performance, art and theory) and Mika Elo (professor of artistic research and the head of the doctoral program in fine arts) as guest contributor to the seminar series Artistic Research Concepts and Contexts, to focus the session on my own contribution to the field of Artistic Research writing; 9.2.2022: Invited by Leena Rouhiainen (Vice Dean (Research), Head of Performing Arts Research Centre, Professor in Artistic Research) to give a lecture/seminar on Writing as Artistic Research; 11.3.2022: invited by Mika Elo, to co-lead a day-long seminar on “Sense” within artistic research, focusing on my research on 'reading as an aesthetic practice'; 12.3.2022: invited by Maiju Loukola to contribute to a seminar related to the ongoing Kone Foundation (2021-2024) funded project 'The City as a Space of Rules and Dreaming'.