Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Operating under the title Not Yet There, Cocker's research focuses on the process of artistic exploration and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’ emerging therein; on models of (art) practice and subjectivity that resist the pressure of a single, stable position by remaining wilfully unresolved. Her mode of working unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to producing texts parallel to and as art practice. Cocker's recent 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; Reading/Feeling (Affect), 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, and as a solo collection entitled The Yes of the No, 2016.

Event: Strategies for Approaching Repeating Problems


Emma Cocker & Rachel Lois Clapham, Fatima Hellberg, Gil Leung, Andrew McGettigan, Francesco Pedraglio, David Raymond Conroy, Alex Vasudevan

Re — Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, presented at Quad, 2012


Strategies for approaching repeating problems presented a series of performances, presentations and talks around the ideas explored in the exhibition, Accidentally on Purpose, at Quad. Taking the notion of a repeating problem as a starting point, invited artists, writers and curators discussed elements of their practice within this framework. Notions of recurring issues were explored from artistic and wider social perspectives; from difficulties inherent in language and communication; to the way artists and writers position themselves in relation to political events and wider social issues.

Re — Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, presented at Quad, 2012

 For Strategies for approaching repeating problems, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker performed a new version of Re — an ongoing iterative project that essays the relation between meaning and intention, hesitation and purpose, and the visible and invisible states of not knowing within the event of practice. Re —  presses on two writers coming together to explore process, product and performance (of text).


New Writing: Helmsman's Knowledge


The act of sailing involves the interaction of the boat and the skipper and the water and the wind. Learning to sail requires the negotiation between and with these different elements; it is a process of facilitation or mediation that attempts to make good the turbulence created by the pull of the water and the push of the wind. Sailing thus involves a mode of attendance or attention to these different and often competing forces; moreover, an intuition for knowing when to yield and for recognizing when to assert control. Our own experience of being in the world might equally be thought of in terms of these interrelations and co-dependencies. Subject formation is a highly contingent process that takes place somehow between and through the event of affecting and of being affected by other things.

The trope of sailing and the figure of the helmsman have become recurrent motifs within my recent research practice, used to articulate the sense of interconnectedness inherent within the experience of ‘being’; moreover, for intimating towards how lived experience might be steered actively through the cultivation of ‘helmsman’s knowledge’. In the first instance, ‘helmsman’s knowledge’ involves an acknowledgement of oneself as a force amongst other forces, awareness of one’s capacity to both affect and be affected by other things. Secondly, ‘helmsman’s knowledge’ might be developed as a ‘tactical’ form of knowledge capable of navigating or working with life’s contingent forces and pressures, by harnessing (rather than simply being blown about by) the push and pull of these various ‘winds’ and ‘currents’. Drawing on my own live experience of various art encounters, alongside selected theoretical and philosophical ideas, I am currently working on new writing that elaborates the notion of ‘helmsman’s knowledge’ or the endeavour of ‘steering a life’ as an ethico-aesthetic practice.

Performance: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis


On 20 September 2012 Nikolaus Gansterer and I presented our performance lecture Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis at Das Lehrerzimmer based in PROGR (Centre of Cultural Production) Bern, alongside a book launch of the publication project, Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought. Below are some images of the event.

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis: performance, Das Lehrerzimmer, Bern

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis: post-performance, Das Lehrerzimmer, Bern
Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis: post-performance, Das Lehrerzimmer, Bern

Below is a translation of a short review of the presentation published here. 

Drawing Thoughts
Review by Roland Fischer

"Drawing is not just for artists. Scientists also draw diligently; barely a research article passes which has no diagram or sketch. The Austrian artist Nikolas Gansterer has developed something of an obsession for these fantastic pictures, not only for their scientific content, but also for the design and the implicit codes; the agreements which are required for making such diagrams immediately readable. Gansterer’s diagram-collection is now in a book that he presented in the Lehrerzimmer yesterday. It is a book full of pictures not just to be read, but to some extent also diagrammed, which became a very special book presentation. Gansterer distinguishes himself by simple, sometimes sprawling diagrams of art, on paper or on a blackboard, while the co-author Emma Cocker reads passages from the book and text fragments projected on the wall. Thus, the two create a very stimulating way of approaching the subject of "Drawing a Hypothesis": a reading as a sketch, as a visually comprehensible making of thoughts." 


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