Emma Cocker is a writer-artist, artistic researcher and Associate Professor in Fine Art. Operating under the working title Not Yet There, Cocker’s research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’ emerging therein.
Cocker is co-founder of the international SAR Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. Her own 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 is concerned with the potential of language as a site of ‘not knowing’ by asking — how might I attempt to write-with the not-yet-known, creating conditions for the emergence of a vocabulary live to the occasionality of each research situation, where content is not already known in advance but rather comes-into-being through the embodied and material process of working-with language? For over 15 years, Cocker has evolved an artistic research method called ‘conversation-as-material’ where conversation is both worked-with as an artistic ‘material’ and reworked through experimental reading practices (Cocker, 2018, 2022), alongside a mode of ‘contiguous writing’ — a way of writing-with that seeks to touch upon rather than being explicitly about. She has contributed articles/chapters to numerous publications exploring aesthetic and embodied approaches to language/writing/reading including chapters in the forthcoming anthology Writing Choreography: Extending the Conventions of Dance (Routledge, 2023) and in Performing Punctuation (Intellect, forthcoming 2024), alongside ‘Reading on Reading’ in Ecologies of Practice (Cocker, Daus, Séraphin, 2019).
Cocker often works in collaboration with other artistic researchers on durational projects unfolding over a number of years, where the studio-gallery, site-specific context or even an online environment are approached as a live laboratory for shared exploration. She was a key-researcher in the PEEK-funded project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) exploring the thinking-feeling-knowing between choreography, drawing and writing (Cocker, Gansterer, Greil, 2017, 2019). Cocker has also performed an invited critical interlocutor within diverse research projects including as a guest researcher within Contingent Agencies (led by Alex Arteaga and Nikolaus Gansterer 2019 - 2023); a critical guest/advisors in Simultaneous Arrivals; and a critical interlocutor in Weaving Codes – Coding Weaves funded by the AHRC Digital Transformations Amplification (2014 – 2016), extending from her involvement in the previous AHRC research project, Live Notation: Transforming Matters of Performance, 2012.
Drawing on her essay ‘Tactics for Not Knowing: On Preparing for the Unexpected’ (originally published in On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2014) and her more recent publications The Yes of the No (2016) and No Telos (2019), Cocker has presented numerous lectures/talks internationally on ‘not knowing’ and open-ended approaches to practice including ‘Towards an Attitude of Openness’ (Keynote SAR conference, 2021); ‘Preparing for the Unexpected’ (Keynote at Uncertain Knowledges colloquium, BCU, UK, 2021) and ‘Embracing Uncertainty’, (in conversation with neuroscientist Stuart Firestein, Rhode Island School of Design, 2021) and as part of the symposia There is no knowledge, only encounters, Groningen, 2022. She has led numerous workshops, seminars and given lectures internationally exploring the relation of art/language/writing including at Bartlett, UCL, London; Bergen School of Art; Aarhus School of Architecture; UniArts Helsinki; Frank Mohr Institute, Groningen, as well as part of the project EUDifferences (hosted by the EU4ART alliance comprises art academies in Riga, Rome, Budapest, and Dresden). Cocker is co-lead of the research thematic Performing Process at Nottingham Trent University, which focuses on the embodied, experiential, relational and material dimensions of artistic making, thinking and knowing, by enquiring into the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity within artistic research. Cocker has taught in higher art education since the mid 2000s, prior to which she was the Education Development Manager at Site Gallery in Sheffield.
Cocker has presented papers and performance lectures nationally and internationally, at artistic research events including Society of Artistic Research and Swiss Artistic Research Network conferences, as well as at various art and performance festivals including ImPulsTanz, Vienna and ANTI festival, Kuopio, Finland. From 2001 – 2005 Emma was co-editor of the publication series Transmission: Speaking and Listening (Site Gallery / Sheffield Hallam University). With Alex Arteaga, Erika Goble, and Juha Himanka, Cocker was co-editor of a Special Issue, “Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research”, of the Journal of Phenomenology and Practice. Emma’s writing on contemporary art has previously been published in magazines/journals including Frieze, Camera Austria, Dance Theatre Journal, The Art Book, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, art + research and Performance Research Journal. Her 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; Reading/Feeling, 2013; 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 (2022) and as the solo collections The Yes of the No, 2016 and How Do You Do? (2024)
Emma's working studio is based at Exchange Place Studios (part of Yorkshire Artspace) in Sheffield - see http://artspace.org.uk/our-studios/