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.

Research Event: Unconditional Love

Emma Cocker and Joanne Lee (Fine Art, NTU) are curating Care + Attend, a strand for Unconditional Love, the Society of Artistic Research Spring Event taking place at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, April 30 - 1 May 2015. Unconditional Love will explore how caring and attention is expressed in such practices as artistic research, open access, auditing, peer-reviewing and critique, as well as the tug of war between science, magic and art on the issue of love. 

Care + Attend 
Curated by Emma Cocker and Joanne Lee 
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/actions, screenings and spoken word. 

Contributors include: Kate Briggs, Daniela Cascella, Belén Cerezo, Emma Cocker, Steve Dutton + Neil Webb, Victoria Gray, Rob Flint, Mark Leahy, Joanne Lee, Martin Lewis, Sarat Maharaj, Brigid McLeer, Hester Reeve, and Lisa Watts. The programme and abstracts for Care + Attend can be read below. An archive of the event - with documentation and reflection will be available here.

     

The programme for Unconditional Love can be downloaded here. 
Booking for the event is here.

Society for Artistic Research (SAR) is an international, non-profit organisation that nurtures, connects and disseminates artistic research as specific practices of creating knowledge and insight. SAR facilitates a range of encounters for its community of artistic practitioners in the pursuit of transformative understanding that impacts on political and societal processes as well as on cultures of research and learning. SAR has an international membership drawn from individual artists, as well as academic and non-academic institutions.