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.

Book Launch: The Event


Excerpt from my essay, [...]


As part of THE EVENT in Birmingham, Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry will be launching their new publication alongside the opening of the group exhibition “which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together?”. The publication (developed in response to a series of evolving solo commissions by Kihlberg Henry, produced by VIVID in collaboration with Danielle Arnaud and Artsway) includes texts by Emma Cocker, Brian Dillon and Mladen Dolar.