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

The Art of Misdirection


Dialogue
New writing and discussion online
Burning Public Art: Issue: 5
April 2007 to July 2007
Guest edited by Gordon Dalton and Gavin Wade.

Dialogue was invited to develop an issue which responded to 'artists working in the public realm' by the organisers of the Situation Leeds festival (taking place in Leeds in May). When discussing the issue at our editorial meetings, the enormity and complexity of such a brief became apparent. From the editorial panel Gordon Dalton and Gavin Wade were selected to take this issue forward and develop a model which, rather than pin-point one aspect, made visible all these issues, debates and fissures. Emma Cocker discusses a number of projects by Lucy Harrison in which the act of wandering is used as a critical tool through which to explore temporary, multiple and contrary readings of place.

'The Art of Misdirection', examines the resurgence of interest in the act of wandering within contemporary art practice. Emma Cocker reflects on a series of projects by artist Lucy Harrison and discusses the ways in which artists have used 'wandering' as a critical tool through which to explore temporary, multiple and contrary readings of place. The intent is to establish a conceptual connection between Harrison’s practice and the writing of cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, who in The Practices of Everyday Life (1984) proposes a critical and resistant function for the act of walking.

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