The Appearance of the More is an artistic research collaboration between Emma Cocker and Nicole Wendel involving an interdisciplinary encounter beyond the borders of drawing and language, towards cross-fertilization, reciprocity and mutual transformation. The shared enquiry attends and attempts to make tangible the appearance and immanent materiality of an emergent drawing in touch with a moving body, whilst searching for a mode of linguistic articulation capable of operating in fidelity to that experience. Since June 2023, Cocker and Wendel have engaged in time-bound periods of live exploration or what they call Ecologies of Relation. The term Ecology of Relation is used for describing a form of experimental and improvisatory practising together for bringing-into-relation the unfolding, embodied processes of drawing and languaging as resonating fields of perception and cooperation. Wendel’s drawing-based and material practice is responsive to the live unfolding of the Ecology and not planned for in advance. The textual component develops Cocker’s ongoing language-based artistic research practice, where transcripts from previous conversations between the two artists become reactivated through an improvisatory reading, rendering porous the boundaries of past and present time. Each Ecology of Relation is underscored by qualities of intimacy, risk, trust, vulnerability, listening and receptivity, softening the border between self/other, between artist/material, through the reciprocity, responsiveness and mutuality of collaboration. The tentative framework of an Ecology of Relation is conceived in hope of creating conditions for inviting or calling forth that which could not be anticipated in advance, holding a space-time open for the possibility of the unknown or unexpected, the appearance of the more.
This recording of a live Ecology of Relation (activated on 26 June 2025) forms the basis of a series of artists’ pages presented as part of the publication Beyond Borders. Whilst this live Ecology of Relation allows for the simultaneity of visual and textual components where spoken text is listened to concurrently with the unfolding of moving image, we are sensitive to the shift from this temporal synchronicity (within a live practice) to the spatial sequentiality (of page-based publication) in the parallel artists’ pages.