Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. 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?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Paper : Re — (regarding, again and again)



Re — (regarding, again and again) was presented as part of a panel Performance Writing (with Emily Orley, Katja Hilevaara and Johanna Linsley) within Performing Documents, a conference at Arnolfini hosted by the University of Bristol, 12 – 14 April 2013. It focuses on the project Re —  my ongoing collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham. The full paper can be read here.


Publication: Revolve:R


Revolve: Meditate, Rotate, Muse, Twist, Turn Over In Mind


Revolve:R is a collaborative project in visual correspondence, curated by Sam Treadaway and Ricarda Vidal in collaboration with a number of international artists,  based throughout Europe and the USA, which culminates in the publishing of a limited edition bookwork. The project explores the possibilities of an exchange of ideas via a visual and tactile – rather than virtual and digital – form of communication. As site and source of collaborative experimentation for diverse artistic practices, Revolve:R is a vehicle for a new collective language, made physical in the shape of the Revolve:R bookwork.

Artists

Diana Ali, Todd DiCiurcio, Patrick Galway, Verena Hägler, Alice Hendy, Antun Maračić, Leila Peacock, Domingo Martínez, Bernd Reichert, Matt Rowe, Emily Speed, Clare Thornton & Emma Cocker, Sam Treadaway, Linnea Vedder, Ricarda Vidal, and the mathematician Oscar Bandtlow.

Revolve:R can be purchased at the forthcoming BABE 13 artists book fair at Arnolfini Gallery. 20th – 21st / April / 2013 or online here.




Text: Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected



Below is my essay Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected commissioned for the forthcoming publication, On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (eds.) Rebecca Fortnum and Elizabeth Fisher (Black Dog Publishing, 2013), which will be presented alongside two collaborative artists' pages (The Italic I, from my collaboration with Clare Thornton, and Re-  performance extracts from my collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham). More details on the publication to follow soon.