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: Ecologies of Practice


We - Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin - have a research exposition published in this current issue of RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research. Our research exposition is entitled Reading on Reading: Ecologies of Reading.

Issue #14 Ecologies of Practice

What can artistic research do in an ecology of research practices?

The RUUKKU issue Ecologies of Practice has its starting point in the Research Pavilion #3 project, hosted by University of the Arts Helsinki, that brought together more than fifty artist-researchers from twenty countries over a period of twenty months. The key aim of Research Pavilion #3 was to foster new artistic research culture and collegial exchange. The project started with an open call for "Research Cells" in April 2018 and evolved through a series of Research Cell Assemblies organised in Helsinki to an intensive period of activity in the context of the Venice Biennale. The high season of the project was wrapped up in October 2019 in the form of a concise research exhibition entitled RP#3 Info Lab that took place at the Exhibition Laboratory in Helsinki. The entire Research Pavilion #3 project is extensively documented in the Research Catalogue (https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/474888/474889).


The call for RUUKKU #14 encouraged the Research Cells and individual participants of the Research Pavilion to submit the outcomes of their research to the peer-review process. The call also explicitly opened the doors for further submissions beyond the Research Pavilion project. The issue consists of fifteen expositions, eight of them deriving from the Research Pavilion #3 project. The authors are Annette Arlander, Alex Arteaga, Louise Atkinson, Laura Bissell, Tine Blom, Claire Robyn Booth-Kurpnieks, Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Ozgu Gundeslioglu, Maria Huhmarniemi, Katja Juhola, Pekka Kantonen, Esa Kirkkopelto, Riikka Latva-Somppi, Maiju Loukola, Otso Lähdeoja, Charulatha Mani, Mari Martin, Maarit Mäkelä, Tuula Närhinen, Kaisa Raatikainen, and Lena Séraphin. Voices section includes a contribution by Lucy Cotter, and the Lectio series features Henna-Riikka Halonen. The issue is edited by Mika Elo, Tero Heikkinen and Henk Slager.

The peer-reviewed issue Ecologies of Practice sums up Research Pavilion #3, but the Research Pavilion project will continue to highlight the manifold practices and approaches of artistic research. These include further publishing activities: an open call for a special issue "Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research" of Phenomenology & Practice is soon to be announced by the members of the Through Phenomena Themselves Research Cell that was part of Research Pavilion #3. The fourth edition of the Research Pavilion will be organised in Helsinki in 2021.