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. She was a key-researcher within the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) for exploring the thinking-feeling-knowing between choreography, drawing and writing. 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; 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.

* Periphery



A new text work of mine (part of which is shown below) is going to be included as part of a limited edition journal/publication entitled *Periphery, which is the first project by YH485 Press. The work specifically explores the notion of the periphery in relation to the idea of 'footnotes', drawing on work undertaken as part of my collaboration with Open City, where footnotes have been explored for their capacity to break or slow down the experience of reading, by creating obstacles or sending the reader into the margins.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Image: extract from 'Pay Attention to the Footnotes'

Artists included in *periphery are: On the Edge Research, Jeremy Miller, Alice Carey, Mike Pearson, Rosemary Shirley, Duncan Higgins, Joanne Lee, Lawrence Bradby, Evi Grigolopoulou, Ann Churcher Clarke, Emma Cocker, Ian Hunter, Jo Robertson, Jonny Aldous, Lee Triming, Andrew Pepper, S Mark Gubb, Jennie Syson, Georgina Barnley, David Berridge/Hyun Jin Cho/David Johnson/Pippa Koszerek, Dean Kenning, Exocet, John Plowman, My Villages, Bruce Ayling, Theo Turpin/Frederico Campagna, Fiona Woods, David Reid/Fiona Maclaren, John Newling, Kathleen Coessens/Marie-Francoise Plissart.

YH485 Press is an independent publishing organisation conceived in March 2009 by Aaron Juneau, Jonathan Watts and Glen Jamieson.