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.

Emerging Landscapes

My paper (see below) has been accepted as part of the forthcoming conference, Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation which will be taking place at the University of Westminster from 25-27 June 2010. The paper explores ideas which have been emerging in a number of recent conference papers that I have presented in relation to the work of Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon.

Exit Strategies  – Cartographies of Escape
Focusing on work by artists Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting, this paper examines how their interrogation of the – physical and virtual – landscape operates parallel to questioning the controlling, striated cartographies that habitually map contemporary subjectivity and social identity. Within their practice, landscape becomes the contested terrain upon which – and by whose terms – the formulation of self and one’s place in the world becomes mapped out and defined. The impact of various social, geopolitical and technological changes upon the representation and conceptualization of landscape is considered synchronous to the production of new modes for conceiving of and controlling how these emergent landscapes are inhabited. For the artists, reimagining and reimaging how landscape might be navigated/negotiated differently is simultaneous to the emergence of an active and dissenting form of subjectivity, intent on creatively and pragmatically exploring other – potentially less acquiescent – models for living or performing a life. The paper draws the exemplar of Brandon and Bunting’s practice into dialogue with a wider philosophical and theoretical landscape, to explore how the cartographical imperative of their work is less a practice of naming and knowing (of territorialization and representation) as a strategy of deterritorialization for rendering the – social and spatial – boundary or limit porous.