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

Open Studios



While I often work in collaboration with other artistic researchers on durational projects unfolding over a number of years, where a residency space, site-specific context or even an online environment are approached as a live "laboratory" for shared exploration, my own ongoing studio space is at Exchange Place Studios, Sheffield (part of Yorkshire Artspace). Every year in November, studio-holders are invited to ‘open up’ their studios providing an opportunity for wider publics to explore the studio spaces, meet the artists and find out more about the diversity of creative practices within the city. The studios at @yartspace are opening up on 18 -19 November 2023. My studio will be open on Sunday 19 November 2023, providing the opportunity for me to gather together and share a selection of the publications and artists’ bookworks resulting from my various collaborations, artistic research activities and other writing projects. 


Tickets are free and available here:

General booking: https://yorkshireartspace.eventbrite.com/

Exchange Place: https://exchangeplace.eventbrite.com/