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: Unruly Utterances




UNRULY UTTERANCES: PARTICIPATION, CRITICALITY AND COMPASS FESTIVAL 2014 Compass Live Art announce the publication of Unruly Utterances: Participation, Criticality and Compass Festival 2014. 

Keen to open up critical conversations about live art and socially engaged practice in the region Compass invited editors Yvonne Carmichael and Amelia Crouch to commission 10 practitioners from different backgrounds to reflect on the broad themes of participation, audience, criticality and writing in a series of short essays and provocations inspired by their own practice and numerous works in Compass Festival 2014. Contributors include Andy Abbott, Emma Cocker, Patrick Coyle, Victoria Gray, Gillie Kleiman, Annie Lloyd, Gill Park, Harold Offeh, Nathan Walker, Adam Young. An online version of the publication can be found here.