Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. 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?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Project: Fragile Materials

I have been invited to participate in a conversation with artist Clare Thornton, as part of her research project Fragile Materials, which will form the basis of her 3 month residency at Aberystwyth Arts Centre May - July 2011. Clare’s research will feed into an artist bookwork that she is developing concerning the texture of conversation. I will be spending some time with Clare during her residency, walking and talking around these ideas. I have previously worked with Clare during The Summer of Dissent project at Plan 9 (Bristol, 2009) and as part of Urban Retreat, a project led by Sophie Mellor in Barrow-in-Furness resulting in the publication, Manual of Marginal Places. More as the project unfolds. 


Project update (September 2011)
The 'conversation' involved an intense few days of discussion, focusing on our shared interest in the motif of the fold and various conceptualizations of folding. Some of the thoughts and ideas from the discussions will be posted here shortly, and will undoubtedly be developed within future writing.

UNFURL
Clare Thornton
Performance Installation
Saturday 3 September 2011, 1-4pm
Red Lodge Museum, Park Row, Bristol
Some of the ideas we talked about around folding relate to a forthcoming exhibition and performance installation that Clare is developing, entitled Unfurl, at the Red Lodge Museum, Bristol. A Tudor Lodge, the opulent setting for a tableau poised to unfurl. Pleats of delicate cloth, lengths of red ribbon, a model sits waiting for his painter. As the piece unfolds, the Artist’s material transforms the scene in our midst. The Audience are invited to come and go as they please, exploring the Red Lodge interiors and returning to the durational Performance as it unfolds over three hours. Unfurl is framed by the Artist's research into depictions of the Fold in paintings, historical interiors and in critical texts. Through the production of objects, garments and writing the Artist explores display, concealment and transformation.