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.

Text: (Un)Doing-Being Together-Apart


Doing Together
is a yearly two-day making and sharing practice symposium at Locksbrook Campus, hosted by Bath Spa University’s Centre of Cultural and Creative Industries and Art Research Centre. Workshops, delivered by staff and PGR students from across the University, share practice-based research methods and a broad range of approaches to practice. doing together is proposed as a generous space to make/do/share and discuss practice with colleagues from a range of different Schools. Throughout the symposium, facilitators - alongside participants - test out ways of doing together in an effort to make their practice-based research explicit, rather than simply describe it.

In 2023, I was invited to join Doing Together as a ‘artist ethnographer’ and to share my thoughts & findings from the symposium as part of the plenary session for this event. I have since written '(Un)Doing-Being Together-Apart', an essay that reworks the transcript of the plenary session (with additional references). The text is an attempt to 'remain in fidelity to the texture of the unfolding reflections that were offered during the experiential liveness of the event itself’.

 

The text can be read here.