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.

Exhibition: Total Recall (TEXTfestschrift festival)




Documentation of installation and exhibition (top images) by curator Philip Davenport.


My work Close Reading (C+ D) (see below) was included as part of a new pop-up installation (curated by derek beaulieu and Phil Davenport) in Bury Art Museum of works celebrating 10 years of the Text Festival (and 20 years of curating by Tony Trehy) until September.  TOTAL RECALL is a guerilla makeover, an A4 invasion of reading into the larger narrative of looking. Unlike the street signs outside, these are not corporate instructions or sales pitches, they are antidotes. Walls, vitrine, archival box — nary  a “book” to be found, but a heap of language left in memory. TOTAL RECALL includes work by local, national and international text - based artists and poets: angela rawlings, Barrie Tullett, Bob Grenier, Carolyn Thompson, Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim, Darren Marsh, derek beaulieu, Emma Cocker, Eric Zboya, Erica Baum, Jaap Blonk, James Davies, Jayne Dyer, Jesse Glass, Karri Kokko, Kristen Mueller, Lawrence Weiner, Leanne Bridgewater, Liz Collini, Lucy Harvest Clarke, Marco Giovenale, Márton Koppány, Matt Dalby, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Paula Claire, Penny Anderson, Peter Jaeger, Phil Davenport, Rachel Defay-Liautard, Ron Silliman, Satu Kaikkonen, Sarah Sanders, Seekers of Lice, Steve Emmerson, Steve Giasson, Tom Jenks, and Tony Lopez. The invitation was to submit an A4 work which in some way addressed the construction of memory. My work folds together close readings of the writing of Deleuze and Cixous.
Emma Cocker, Close Reading (C+ D), produced for Total Recall (TEXTfestschrift festival)

Works will also be included in The Text Art Archive, based at Bury Art Museum, which was established in March 2013 in conjunction with Bury Archives Service and the Centre for Poetics at Birkbeck University of London with the intention of documenting, securing and making easily available information on the history and practice of Text Art (sometime referred to as Visual Language Art).