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.

Symposium: Drawing Articulations: A Radical Drawing Symposium


IMAGE: Video stills from an Ecology of Relation activated on zoom (March 2023), within the context of the ongoing research project The Appearance of the More by Emma Cocker and Nicole Wendel. Drawings: Nicole Wendel. 

An extract of our video presentation can be encountered here.


For the symposium, Drawing Articulations, Emma Cocker and Nicole Wendel propose a video-work for sharing their current collaborative artistic research enquiry, The Appearance of the More. The video comprises recorded extracts from a recent Ecology of Relation, a term used for describing a form of live practising together – or of being-in-touch – through which Cocker and Wendel explore ways for bringing-into-relation the unfolding and embodied processes of drawing and languaging as sensitive fields of perception and cooperation.  Within an Ecology of Relation, different practices of drawing and voicing become activated through heightened attunement to the interrelation of different bodies, forces and agencies – both human and more-than-human – within the contingent process of shared exploration. Specifically, through the meeting of different performative practices, this enquiry attempts to attend to and make tangible the appearance and immanent materiality of an emergent drawing in touch with a moving body, whilst searching for a mode of linguistic articulation capable of operating in fidelity to that experience, to the emerging phenomenon (of drawing). The tentative framework of an Ecology of Relation is conceived in hope of creating conditions for inviting or calling forth that which could not be anticipated in advance, holding a space-time open for the possibility of the unknown or unexpected. What might emerge as a physical embodiment in space (as drawing) or audibly through language (as voicing), through attending to the presently perceived moment, through sensitivity, receptivity and deep listening to the silence, to what is already there? This shared enquiry explores the mutually constitutive relation between drawing and voiced language – how does each support the emergence of the other, moreover, what else might emerge in the spaces in-between? Language becoming drawing becoming language becoming…. How is the relation and influence between drawing/language: beyond following and leading, towards a quality of simultaneity, the kairotic co-emergence of naming and the named.


More about Drawing Articulations: A Radical Drawing Symposium here.