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

Research group: withing

Delphine Chapuis Schmitz --- Emma Cocker --- Laressa Dickey --- Sabina Holzer --- Ines Marita Schärer --- Litó Walkey

This is an emergent ‘thematic node’ (within the frame of the SAR SIG for Language-based Artistic Research) for exploring the relation of languaging and bodying: How does languaging affect bodying? How does bodying affect languaging? How does movement inform wording? How does wording inform moving? How can we explore ways for languaging/bodying with, through and from sensing and somatic practices? How to find wording and worlding for the polyphonies of somatic experiences?

 

scores - notations - situations – conditions

 

Initiated through the mutual witnessing of shared resonances and affinities during Convocation II, we conceived this ‘node’ as an emergent framework for experimenting together, for sharing embodied practising, for testing possibilities for a bodily becoming of language/words. Since November 2023, we have been meeting online to explore how we might create shared conditions and situations for practising body/languaging, both through being-with (online) and being-apart (offline). Currently, our shared exploration unfolds through the rhythm of rotation, an evolving constellation of ‘pairings’ and ‘proposals’ based on a bi-monthly cycle. For each bi-monthly iteration, a pairing (two of us working together) devises a score/proposal/invitation/focus which we then all collectively test, enact, activate, reconnecting together after a period of practice (1 month) for sharing materials / findings / discoveries / reflections from the shared research process.  

 

Being in doing.

Being in practice together.

Body/Language.

Between the two, activating the between.

Moving

between different modalities,

shifting from one to the other.

Tilting towards.

Along-siding.