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: Twenty Years of MAKE: Back to the Future of Women's Art


My interview with Helen Chadwick, Indifference in Difference has been published in Twenty Years of MAKE: Back to the Future of Women's Art, Maria Walsh, Mo Throp (I.B.Tauris, 2015), which is now available.


During the 1970s, adding 'women's' to 'art' was a powerfully political act. Fuelled by the momentum of the women's liberation movement, artists, art historians, critics and curators began to explore the women's art practice, as distinct from men's, and to challenge its invisibility in the established art world and historical canon. In the 1980s, they continued to creatively critique representations of female sexuality, and in the 1990s, some began to embrace the 'post-feminist' idea of difference and the performance of gender. Throughout this pivotal period, the MAKE magazine offered a unique platform for academics, artists and arts professionals to critically engage with women's art. Though the need to talk about 'women's art' seemed to lose some of its political urgency in the early 2000s, many artists, art historians and art students are now once again explicitly engaging with feminist art histories and art practices as possible models and precedents for resistance. Now is the time to revisit the past, in order to understand and galvanise the energy of the present. Gathering together the work of eminent writers such as Griselda Pollock and Marina Warner, on celebrated artists such as Helen Chadwick, Sarah Lucas and The Guerrilla Girls, this unparalleled anthology of material from the MAKE archive allows us to trace the lineages and links between then and now.

Contributors: Rachel Armstrong | Fiona Barber | Pennina Barnett | Christine Battersby | Monica Bohm-Duchen | Chila Burman | David Burrows | Susan Butler | Deborah Cameron | Helen Chadwick | Janice Cheddie | Laura Cottingham | Marilyn Crabtree | Emma Cocker | Susan Croft | Anna Douglas | Catherine Elwes | Carole Enahoro | Simon Ford | Rebecca Fortnum | Lorraine Gamman | Pam Gerrish Nunn | The Guerrilla Girls | Judith Halberstam | Gill Houghton | Janice Jefferies | Joanna Krysa | Kathy Kubicki | Claire MacDonald | Aoife MacNamara | Rosy Martin | Marsha Meskimmon | Sadie Murdoch | Roxane Permar | Sadie Plant | Griselda Pollock | Nancy Proctor | Shirley Read | Heidi Reitmaier | Hilary Robinson | Paula Smithard | Mo Throp | Yvonne Volkart | Maria Walsh | Marina Warner | Liz Wells | Margaret Whitford | Val Williams | Linda Wilson Green