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

New work: Close Reading (Feeling it for You)


Tests from a series of new ‘Close Readings’ generated from my experience as ‘Seer-in-Residence’ (see posts below). The texts encountered during my residency included: Roland Barthes, ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’, from Georges Bataille, The Story of Eye; Catherine Clémente, ‘Syncope’s Strategies, from Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture; Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, from Stigmata: Escaping Texts; Luce Irigaray, ‘To perceive the invisible in you’, from To Be Two. The second 'close reading' draws on a sentence from Cixous' Writing Blind, "Answer: the text needs the paper. It is in the contact with the sheet of paper that sentences emerge", which seems especially pertinent to the concerns of my Close Readings.
 
Emma Cocker, Close Reading, (L.I.T.B.T)

Emma Cocker, Close Reading, (H.C.W.B)