Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University. Emma's research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’ therein. Her practice unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches, alongside a mode of ‘contiguous writing’ — a way of writing-with that seeks to touch upon rather than being explicitly about. Her writing is 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, 2013; 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.

Exhibition: Wanderlust


12th January – 14th February 2011
Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University

A version from my serial project, Field Proposals will be shown as part of the exhibition, Wanderlust. Wanderlust presents a travel metaphor to mark out the places we wish to travel to through our work. Selected works pertain to a sense of travelling (whether spatially or conceptually), a speculative directionality or movement towards the future. The Field Proposals are an ongoing attempt to map or give shape to the conceptual landscape of a practice, where the identification of specific coordinates fails to provide any coherent or definitive structure, instead only revealing further zones of indeterminacy. The work obliquely refers to a process of mapping an indeterminate (conceptual) territory; the coordinates themselves often referring to processes of wandering, getting lost, border crossing, searches, quests, and the failure to arrive at a definite destination.

Background to exhibition: Wanderlust speaks of the places, real, imagined and metaphorical, that we travel to through our practice as artists, designers, thinkers and educators.  It invokes the desire to wander exploring the world as we find it, often straying from the path and discovering a new route.

 This exhibition is a snapshot survey of experimental practice across the range of disciplines in the School of Art and Design.  The works featured demonstrate the complex process of creation undertaken by practitioner / researchers within the School community.  Wanderlust is curated as a dialogic space, where varied and diverse practices are placed in proximity to each other, opening up possibilities of new discourses, collaborations and projects.