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.

Event + Writing: Margins of Indeterminacy


Exhibition Tour
Agnieska Polska and Raphael Hefti
Nottingham Contemporary
17th December 2014: 6pm - 6.45pm

I have been invited to explore both exhibitions – Agnieska Polska and Raphael Hefti - through the prism of my own research interests, in relation to the process of practice and of ‘not knowing’. My introduction will focus around the idea of ‘Margins of Indeterminacy’ drawing also on a text I have recently produced for Camera Austria, responding to Hefti’s work in the current exhibition. A version of the text can be read below.

Raphael Hefti, installation view of Raw Draw at RaebervonStenglin, 2014. 
Courtesy the artist and RaebervonStenglin