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.

Research Event: Care + Attend (Unconditional Love)


I will be collaborating with my NTU colleague, Joanne Lee, as invited 'curators' for the forthcoming artistic research conference event, Unconditional Love, organised by SAR Society of Artistic Research, April 30 - May 1 2015, Chelsea College of Arts / University of the Arts London. More about our proposed session Care + Attend below.


Image: Joanne Lee, Pam Flett Press, Issue 1, 'Call yourself a bloody professional'


Care + Attend comprises a constellation of fragments and extracts - of different intensities and durations - where the exposition of research emerges as a poetic and performative event, generating moments of potential resonance and dialogue. This event explores the theme Unconditional Love through the principles (perhaps even methodologies) of care and attention, as applied within specific (artistic) practices of both the everyday and of the self. Beginning with the observation that both curate and curiosity have shared etymology in the term ‘care’, Care + Attend seeks to develop a research vocabulary based on receptivity, openness, fidelity, integrity, intimacy, friendship and commitment (whilst not ignoring the parallel principles of distraction, inattention, the act of closing one’s eyes or of looking away). Cocker and Lee have invited a range of artists & writers to share and reflect on their own processes, philosophies and politics of care and attention, and to present these through live performance, screenings and spoken word.