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. She was a key-researcher within the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) for exploring the thinking-feeling-knowing between choreography, drawing and writing. 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; 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.

Symposium: Critical Engagements with Engagement


I will be presenting a paper/reading at a forthcoming symposium, Critical Engagements with Engagement on Friday 26th July, 10am – 4pm at the Bloc gallery, Sheffield. The symposium will focus on the discussions and debates that surround public and artistic engagement. Drawing on my own practice-based involvement in various participatory research projects (specifically the performance collaborations Open City and Performing the City), my presentation gathers together prose extracts and photographic visuals gleaned from my ongoing research enquiry, Performing Communities. Performing Communities interrogates how participatory performance-based interventions in the public realm can help support the emergence of critical – and potentially resistant – models of subjectivity and collectivity, specifically those forms of ‘temporary invented community’ (Miwon Kwon) created in and through the act of participation itself. Within this enquiry I investigate how participatory performance practice might intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated and navigated, through its capacity for producing ‘counter-publics’, new social formations for rehearsing and testing alternative forms of individual and collective subjectivity.