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

Text work: new Open City texts



I am currently working with Open City (Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday) to develop new work to take to Toronto as part of the forthcoming PSi Performing Publics events in June, and also for new festival contexts for the UK in the Autumn. Here are 2 new postcard texts (No.9 and No.10), which will complete the series of cards made in collaboration with Open City (2007 - 2010). We are currently working on a limited edition foldable pamphlet which will be designed by Joff+Ollie, for bringing all ten texts together for the first time, alongside a series of instruction and visual propositions. If you would like a copy of this publication please email emma.cocker@ntu.ac.uk.