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: L’ultima Cena



I have been invited to visit and respond to an exhibition/project entitled L’ultima cena, taking place at the Refettorio di San Michele in Pescia, Italy (3-4 September). L’ultima cena is a project initiated by an invitation issued to 13 artists (including Brigid McLeer with whom I have worked before) to make sited work in response to the little known and rarely seen ‘Last Supper’ fresco by Fieravante Sansoni (1625) located in the former convent refectory, the Refettorio di San Michele in Pescia. It is anticipated that this context will provide a foil against which to explore slippages of representation, time and reality occurring both within the fresco, through its relationship to an ‘original’, and also to the site itself. Starting points for exploration are likely to include ideas around 'being with' and empathy; relations between individual and collective identity; the affective potentiality of everyday situations; a collapsing of the binary relation of fidelity and betrayal. More to follow soon.