Role
Emma Cocker is an Associate Professor in Fine Art and has a research leadership and teaching role within the School of Art and Design. Specifically, she is co-lead (with Danica Maier) of the research thematic Performing Process within the frame of the Artistic Research Centre at NTU and has a mentoring role supporting the research activity of colleagues within Fine Art.
The core of Emma’s teaching activity is at Doctoral level where she supervises several PhD researchers, as well as co-leading the research seminar programme DREAM (Doctoral Research Encounters in and through Artistic Methodologies) with Danica Maier. Emma is interested in supervising PhD researchers working on issues and questions that resonate with her own enquiries and the wider thematic Performing Process. (See Emma's “Research” for more information).
Emma also leads a seminar series for the MFA Fine Art exploring how different language-based practices (reading, writing, speaking) operate within a fine art practice. This builds on her own research interests as a writer-artist and her role as co-founder of the Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group on Language-based Artistic Research. See here for more details.
Career overview
Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art, with an international research profile involving publication, performance, exhibition and guest lecturing. She joined NTU Fine Art in 2005, having previously taught at other HE institutions and also within the gallery sector. Emma has a BA in Fine Art (University of Plymouth), MA in Visual Culture (University of Nottingham) and MRes in Contemporary Art History (Goldsmiths). More recently, Emma trained to be a qualified yoga teacher, and is interested in how a heightened sense of the body and of embodiment - through movement-awareness and attention practices - might be integrated into fine art teaching and research.
Research areas
Emma’s research can be conceived as a series of interlocking clusters of enquiry:
Performing Process: This thematic (co-led with Danica Maier) explores what is at stake in focusing on the process of practice - the embodied, experiential, relational and material dimensions of artistic making, thinking and knowing. This research thematic explores the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity within artistic research. How might an encounter with the unfamiliar and strange(r) operate as a micro-political, ethico-aesthetic practice? How might process-focused artistic exploration intervene in and offer new perspectives on the uncertain conditions of contemporary life?
Being in the Midst: Performing Thinking in Action: Linked to Performing Process and a forthcoming book that Emma is currently working on, this enquiry asks: How is artistic thinking, thinking-through-doing, thinking with-and-through practice? What is at stake in the shift of attention from the measurable outputs of artistic activity to a heightened awareness of its qualitative processes: the unfolding decision-making, the not-knowing, the navigation of competing forces, the activity of working with/through obstacles or of ‘figuring’ something out? These interests are explored from a broad and transforming perspective to include diverse fields such as visual arts, performance, choreography as well as expanded language-based practices. How is thinking-in-action performed with and through the body (through dance, somatic practice); with others (through collaboration); with and through drawing; with and through language practices of conversation, reading, writing; with and through material encounters (with objects, with media, with technologies, even with code)?
Arts of Living – existing in the space between art and philosophy, ethics and aesthetics, this enquiry explores different (artistic) practices that could be considered as ‘practices of the existence’ or ‘arts of living’ where life is conceived as a malleable material that can be approached (in Michel Foucault's terms) as if it were a ‘work of art’. This research focus involves exploring different tactics and practices through which everyday life is explored in ethico-aesthetic terms, as a creative space of lived enquiry, through various practices of attention and awareness, for being-with as well as for being-apart.
Expanded Language-based Practices – this enquiry unfolds restlessly along the margins of writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to working with and through language, using a matrix of writing, reading and speaking practices. Emma’s research is concerned with the critical poetics of language, the visual and physical materiality of language, alongside an interest in experimental reading and conversation-based practices. Emma is co-founder of the Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group on Language-based Artistic Research.
See also Emma's profile and research projects on the research catalogue here.
See also Emma's blog/website Not Yet There here.
External activity
Emma often works in collaboration with other artists, as well as operating as an invited critical interlocutor within diverse research projects. In 2019, she was an invited artistic researcher as part of the Research Pavilion, Venice. She is currently working with Alex Arteaga, Nicole Wendel and Sabine Zahn on the research project, Thinking Aesthetic Thinking Through Aesthetic Research Practices. From 2014 – 2017 she was a key researcher on the international, interdisciplinary research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, a collaboration with Vienna-based artist Nikolaus Gansterer and choreographer Mariella Greil (funded by PEEK, Austria). She was an invited critical interlocutor as part of the international research project Weaving Codes – Coding Weaves funded by the AHRC Digital Transformations Amplification (2014 – 2016), extending from her involvement in the previous AHRC research project, Live Notation: Transforming Matters of Performance, 2012.
Emma has presented papers and performance lectures nationally and internationally, at artistic research events including Society of Artistic Research and Swiss Artistic Research Network conferences, as well as at various art and performance festivals including ImPulsTanz, Vienna and ANTI festival, Kuopio, Finland. Emma is a peer-reviewer for the Journal of Artistic Research, RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research, AREA, TRACEY, Rhizomes, Journal of Visual Arts Practice, Journal of Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education and Project Anywhere, and is on the Editorial Board for The Journal of Architecture and Culture. From 2001 – 2005 Emma was co-editor of the publication series Transmission: Speaking and Listening (Site Gallery / Sheffield Hallam University).
Publications
Emma'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; Reading/Feeling, 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018, and as a solo collection entitled The Yes of the No, 2016. With Alex Arteaga and Juha Himanka, Emma is co-editor of a Special Issue, “Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research”, of the Journal of Phenomenology and Practice. She is currently working on the co-authored publication Live Coding: A Users’ Manual, and a solo-authored publication entitled Being in the Midst: Performing Thinking in Action. Alongside her academic publications (See Publications) and artists’ books, Emma’s writing on contemporary art and theory has been published in magazines/journals including Frieze, Camera Austria, Dance Theatre Journal, The Art Book, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, art + research and Performance Research Journal.
Press expertise
- Artistic research
- Artistic process
- Art-writing
- Language-based artistic research