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.

Performance: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis


On 20 September 2012 Nikolaus Gansterer and I presented our performance lecture Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis at Das Lehrerzimmer based in PROGR (Centre of Cultural Production) Bern, alongside a book launch of the publication project, Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought. Below are some images of the event.

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis: performance, Das Lehrerzimmer, Bern

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis: post-performance, Das Lehrerzimmer, Bern
Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis: post-performance, Das Lehrerzimmer, Bern

Below is a translation of a short review of the presentation published here. 

Drawing Thoughts
Review by Roland Fischer

"Drawing is not just for artists. Scientists also draw diligently; barely a research article passes which has no diagram or sketch. The Austrian artist Nikolas Gansterer has developed something of an obsession for these fantastic pictures, not only for their scientific content, but also for the design and the implicit codes; the agreements which are required for making such diagrams immediately readable. Gansterer’s diagram-collection is now in a book that he presented in the Lehrerzimmer yesterday. It is a book full of pictures not just to be read, but to some extent also diagrammed, which became a very special book presentation. Gansterer distinguishes himself by simple, sometimes sprawling diagrams of art, on paper or on a blackboard, while the co-author Emma Cocker reads passages from the book and text fragments projected on the wall. Thus, the two create a very stimulating way of approaching the subject of "Drawing a Hypothesis": a reading as a sketch, as a visually comprehensible making of thoughts."