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.

Event: Open Studios






21 – 22 November 11.00 – 16.00, Open Studios at Exchange Place - presenting my own writing about, in parallel to and as art practice. Examples above including 'Re-Writing' in RITE, 'Close Reading' in The Other Room Anthology, 'Seeing Shadows' in Seers-in-Residence, '[...]' in Beginnings, 'Infinite' in Everything is so  Infinite, 'Room for Manoeuvre, or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins', in Manual for Marginal Places. Artists' books additionally presented included Performing the City, The Italic I, Manual, Open City. This annual event provided an opportunity for reflecting on different tactics of writing operating in my own practice: serial forms of prose-poetry written in dialogue with others' practice, conversation-as-material - collaborative dialogue distilled into poetic fragments, 'close reading' - acts of looking at language close up through visual magnification, performance and performative writing, strategies of listing, extraction and appropriation, scripts and scores.