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.

Event: Still/Moving in conversation


Speedwell, site specific installation by Still/Moving, Plymouth, 2020.


“On Friday 23rd of October at 11.00, Emma Cocker will be joining Still/Moving in conversation around her text “The Yes of the No”. Emma’s text was a crucial influence to Still/Moving during the depths of the first lockdown when they worried about potentially negative readings of their sculpture, particularly it's firm stance on 'No'. This text gave them the courage to stand by their instinct, to draw a line in the sand, to say "NO", to affirm their position. They will be discussing this among other themes covered in her work”. 

Speedwell is a site-specific 67 m long illuminated text work by the artistic collective Still/Moving, on Plymouth’s Mount Batten Breakwater designed to provoke reflection about the human impulse to explore new worlds and the repercussions of this behaviour. It urgently asks us to imagine new ways of living, caring and dying well on this damaged planet.  Throughout the duration of Speedwell's installation on Mount Batten Breakwater, a series of 'in conversations' will be held between Still/Moving and invited speakers to discuss some of the themes raised by the project. 


Details of the conversation here. 


More on the Speedwell project here