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.

Collaboration: Appearance of the More

In May 2024, I will be in Berlin working with artist Nicole Wendel, as part of our emergent collaboration provisionally titled Appearance of the More. Within this project, we are exploring ways of practising together – or of being-in-touch – for bringing-into-relation the unfolding and embodied processes of drawing and languaging as sensitive fields of perception and cooperation. Specifically, through the meeting of different performative practices, this enquiry attempts to attend to and make tangible the appearance and immanent materiality of an emergent drawing in touch with a moving body, whilst searching for a mode of linguistic articulation capable of operating in fidelity to that experience, to the emerging phenomenon (of drawing).


Image: Documentation from our last live working together in person, Berlin 2023.