Emma Cocker is a writer, artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art. Operating under the title Not Yet There, her enquiry focuses on exploring models of (art) practice and subjectivity, which resist or refuse the pressure of a single or stable position by remaining willfully unresolved. As a practice-based enquiry, Not Yet There is shaped by an interdisciplinary, hybridized approach, operating restlessly along the threshold of writing/art. Whilst embracing the potential of the essayistic (as a tentative attempt or trial), Cocker’s practice also includes experimental, performative and collaborative approaches for producing texts about, parallel to and as art practice. Processes of condensation, extraction, fragmentation, listing, footnoting, cross-referencing and appropriation are adopted as critical methods for art-writing, alongside the cultivation of a serialized form of prose-poetry collectively entitled Condensations.

Biography & Statement

Emma Cocker is a writer, artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Operating under the title Not Yet There, recent writing has focused on exploring models of (art) practice and subjectivity, which resist or refuse the pressure of a single or stable position by remaining willfully unresolved. This enquiry attempts to recuperate a critical, even affirmative, potential within seemingly negative experiences or conditions such as failure and the fragmentary states of uncertainty, boredom, hesitation, immobility and inconsistency. Deployed skilfully within a practice (and disinvested of their personal or psychological connotations), such conditions have the capacity to be re-inscribed in resistant and dissident terms, as generative sites of production. Cocker's practice and research often addresses the critical value of those moments before a decision or resolution has been reached, the points where ‘thinking’ is activated or provoked within practice. Not Yet There is concerned with prolonging, emphasising and honouring this space of indeterminacy, by investigating the potentiality of a form of ‘thinking’ that precedes — and might indeed be different to —  ‘knowledge’. It attempts to shift attention from the deliberate (directly purposeful) to the process of deliberation (care/weighing-up) insisting that purpose or meaning is not always synonymous with the notion of achieving a ‘goal’.

Cocker’s current practice can be conceived as a series of interlocking (or rather entangled) clusters of enquiry including: The Potentiality of Failure (which advocates a critical value for failure, positing it as a form of resistance to or refusal of the dominant progressive, teleological or goal-oriented tendencies of contemporary experience); Performing Communities (investigating the capacity of participatory performance to intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated and navigated by producing ‘counter-publics’, new social formations for rehearsing and testing alternative – ethical, political, critical – forms of sociability and collectivity); Kairotic Landscapes (which addresses the relationship between how landscape is lived or performed to the emergence of a critical —and potentially resistant — form of subjectivity), Stray: The Art of Wandering (exploring how irresolution, uncertainty, disorientation and the process of ‘getting lost’ can be discussed as tactical methods within artistic practice) and The Enquiring of the Enquirer (which considers the process/endeavour of artistic practice as a philosophical enquiry). Central to Cocker's current research-practice is an exploration of tactical practices that might constitute a form of techné, (a species of 'productive knowledge' or even 'Helmsman's knowledge'), and an examination of the kairotic potential (of opportune timing) therein. 


 Recent writing includes ‘Not Yet There: Endless Searches and Irresolvable Quests’ in Telling Stories: Countering Narrative in Art, Theory and Film (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009); ‘Over and Over, Again and Again’ in Failure, (Documents of Contemporary Art Series, Whitechapel/MIT, 2010) and in Contemporary Art / Classical Myth (Ashgate Press, 2011); ‘Performing Stillness: Community in Waiting’ in Stillness in a Mobile World (Routledge, 2011); ‘The Restless Line, Drawing’ in Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art (I.B.Tauris, 2011); ‘Distancing the If and Then’ in Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought (Springer, 2011); ‘Border Crossing: Practices for Beating the Bounds’ in Liminal Landscapes, (Routledge, 2011) and ‘Towards an Emergent Knowledge of the Margins’ in Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation, (2012). Cocker has also written texts for exhibition catalogues and journals including Frieze, Dance Theatre Journal, The Art Book, a-n, engage, drain, m/c, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice and artandresearch. 

 Whilst embracing the potential of the essayistic (as a tentative effort or trial), Cocker's practice includes experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to producing texts parallel to and as art practice. As a practice-based enquiry, Not Yet There is shaped by an interdisciplinary, hybridized approach, operating restlessly along the threshold of writing/art. Cocker’s practice embraces performative, invitational, propositional and even cartographic models for producing texts. Processes of appropriation, extraction, fragmentation, listing, footnoting and cross-referencing have become critical methods for attempting to produce 'openings' rather than drawing conclusions, or for appearing purposeful whilst remaining without clear or discernible intent. Ongoing art-writing projects include the development of a serialized form of prose-poetry collectively entitled Condensations, comprising examples such as ‘The Yes of the No!’ and ‘Making Room for Manoeuvre; or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins’; alongside a series of Close Readings where the act of attending to various critical texts 'close-up' renders them unintelligible. Cocker's practice often involves the slippage between writing on page, to performance in time, between still and moving image, between individual and collective action. 

 Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists: these have included working in dialogue with the performance-based collective Open City from 2007 - 2010; an ongoing project entitled Re - with Rachel Lois Clapham, iterations of which have been presented in Afterlive  (Norwich Arts Centre, 2010), Unfixed  (Flat Time House, The John Latham Archive, London, 2010); Writing (the) Space, (Wild Pansy Press Project Space, Leeds, 2011), and Accidentally on Purpose (Quad, Derby, 2012) and a collaboration with Clare Thornton, entitled Tacturiency. From 2011 Cocker has collaborated with artist Nikolaus Gansterer on a series of performance-lecture entitled Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, presented at M_HKA, Antwerp; KNAW, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Project Space, Vienna and NGBK, Berlin, and as part of 'An Exhibition on the Study of Knowledge', Stadtpark Forum, Graz. Cocker is a member of the Publishing Advisory Group for the Live Art Development Agency, part of the Editorial Board for Architecture and Culture, and a peer-reviewer for the online publications TRACEY, Rhizomes and the Journal of Artistic Research.
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