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.

Publication: Performing the City

Performing the City is a new publication/pamphlet produced collaboration with Bianca Scliar Mancini and Sara Wookey. Performing the City brings together material from Movement and the City, an ongoing research project-workshop led by Bianca Scliar Mancini and Sara Wookey, and Experiments Along the Brink of I, a prose response by myself to witnessing and participating in Movement and the City workshops in Zagreb (2009) and Toronto (2010).

Above: Performing the City: Pamphlet cover and 'Experiments Along the Brink of I', Emma Cocker

Project: Seers-in-Residence


From Where I Stand I Can See You
Traci Kelly and Rita Marhaug
Monday 7 January - Friday 8 February 2013
The Bonington Gallery, Nottingham

Traci Kelly and Rita Marhaug. Photograph: Bjarte Bjørkum
From Where I Stand I Can See You brings together two artists that investigate their own subjectivity in relation to social-political economies and corporeal boundaries. Through differing approaches each artist creates a shared language through mired and inky surfaces on skin and paper. By exhibiting solo works together Kelly and Marhaug are grappling to hold each other in view and create the context to embark on a collaborative project, whilst Kelly is in residency at USF Verftet, Bergen (April-June 2013).

Seers-in-Residence

The Seers-in Residence is a programme which will engage four researchers from Nottingham Trent University, drawn from across various departments and schools. They have been invited to interact with Traci Kelly’s mono print installation Feeling It For You (Perspective) to evoke their own practice and research interests.
Emma Cocker
Thursday 10 January, 10 am – 1 pm

Emma Cocker’s practice interrogates the critical potential of failure, uncertainty, boredom, hesitation, immobility and inconsistency by exploring models of practice and subjectivity that remain willfully open or unresolved.
Joanne Lee
Thursday 17 January, 10 am – 1 pm

Joanne Lee investigates the aesthetics of everyday urban life and explores the possibilities of the essay in textual and visual forms as a creative and critical entity.
Ben Judd
Wednesday 23 January, 2 pm – 5 pm

Ben Judd interacts with and creates alternative belief systems based on observations of social groups such as witches and Morris dancers, to which he remains paradoxically both close and distant, connected and disconnected.
Dr Simon Cross

Thursday 31 January 10 am – 1 pm

Simon Cross’ research engages with the representation and attending imagery of madness in the social sphere through historical and contemporary trajectories.


Exhibition: Marbled Reams


The Modern Institute, Osborne Street, Glasgow, 01/12/2012—12/01/2013

Laura Aldridge, Aline Bouvy & John Gillis, Emma Cocker, KIMI CONRAD, Sean Cummins, Sean Edwards, Ed Fella, Heike-Karin Föll, Dan Ford, Babak Ghazi, Sam Gordon, Mark Harasimowicz, David L. Hayles, Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Matt Jamieson, Scott King, Jon Knight, Piotr Łakomy, Sara MacKillop, David Newey, David Osbaldeston, Anna Parkina, James Richards, James E Smith, Jack Strange, Steven Warwick, Jean-Michel Wicker.

'Marbled Reams' is a print project founded in 2009 by Glasgow based artist Tom Godfrey. The project started with the initial production of 12 reams and continues with new editions produced on a bi-monthly basis. Within The Modern Institute's ground floor vitrines, Godfrey will be installing a rotating display of all 23 Marbled Ream editions produced so far. The project is derived from an artwork produced by Godfrey (pictured) with the same title in 2007 where a ream of A4 paper was marbled along one edge and displayed on a glass shelf. Acknowledging the potential vested in a stack of blank paper,  the artwork has been developed into an editioning/ publishing project where artists are invited to produce a single or multiple A4 work that is photocopied onto an entire ream of paper. This is marbled along the front edge offering a shared origin for all 500 sheets, documented for the projects website, and then displayed in its entirety, highlighting the projects link with both printed matter and sculpture. Pages from the reams are available for £1 each and annual subscriptions are available for £18. http://www.marbledreams.com/


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