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.

RITE launch


RITE will be launched at PSL in Leeds on the evening of March 26 2010. The event will include propositions on the subject of art writing and live readings by RITE contributors. 

Published in 2009, RITE is the result of a nine month collaboration with Critical Communities, a New Work Network and Open Dialogues project exploring the practice of critical writing on and as new work (interdisciplinary and live art). Featuring the work of the Critical Community, RITE is a collection that brings together 19 original texts by UK based art writers (many from the Yorkshire region) that enact expanded acts of criticism, question the essay form, use language as material and attempt to work the different ways that writing can be on or about new work.

This event is supported by Arts Council England, PSL and New Work Network.