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: Marbled Reams


I have been invited to contribute a single page-work for the next 'issue' of the project, Marbled Reams curated by Tom Godfrey. 

Emma Cocker, Close Reading, Marbled Ream

Marbled Reams is a print project that launched at Publish and Be Damned 2009 with the initial production and display of 12 reams. The project continues with new reams being produced on a bi-monthly basis. The project is run by Glasgow based artist Tom Godfrey.
Marbled Reams is derived from an artwork produced by Godfrey with the same title in 2007 where a ream of A4 paper was marbled along one edge and displayed on a glass shelf.
 Realising the potential vested in a stack of blank paper, and the ease at which the title can be mis-read as 'Marble Dreams', the artwork has been developed into an editioning/publishing project where artists are invited to produce a single A4 work that is then photocopied onto an entire ream. This is then marbled along one edge, offering a shared origin for all 500 sheets, documented for the projects website, and then displayed in its entirety, highlighting another theme in the project of linking the display of printed matter with that of sculpture.

Previous Marbled Reams contributors:
 Laura Aldridge, Aline Bouvy & John Gillis
, Sean Cummins, 
Sean Edwards, 
Ed Fella
, Heike-Karin Föll, Dan Ford, 
Babak Ghazi
, Sam Gordon, 
Mark Harasimowicz , David L. Hayles
, Matt Jamieson, 
Scott King, 
Piotr Łakomy, 
Sara MacKillop, 
David Newey
, David Osbaldeston
, Anna Parkina, 
James Richards , James E Smith
, Jack Strange, 
Jean-Michel Wicker


Publication/Exhibition: In The Presence of Multiple Possibilities

I have been invited to contribute to a publication by Ordinary Culture, part of the exhibition In The Presence of Multiple Possibilities. My contribution will be from my ongoing series, Close Readings.



Background to the exhibition
In The Presence Of Multiple Possibilities takes as its focus the philosophical (and everyday) notion of contingency - That which cannot be ascertained to be true, nor false, in any given situation. The selection of works has focused on those that seek to make flexible the rigid, or unpick the fabric of a given system or structure, to reveal the contingent space of possibility in its production. 

In The Presence of Multiple Possibilities combines sculpture, video, performance and publication to draw attention to, and attempt to manifest, the discrepancy between predicted future and actual outcome.
 The exhibition brings together eight artists who explore the complex contingencies of translation, spontaneity, prediction and speculation. Either creating a structure for a continued development or deliberately leaving a work incomplete or uncertain, their works provide a space for the contemplation of multiple possible outcomes. Whether durational or static, all of the works hint towards their role in a longer trajectory. The project will include new commissions by Kimi Conrad, Matthew Noel-Tod and a commissioned publication by collective Ordinary Culture (formerly YH485). Ordinary Culture’s contribution to the project explores the publication as incomplete and subject-to-change, encouraging the participation of the audience in the materialisation of the exhibition’s legacy. "The commissioned work takes the form of a simple binding, appropriating the outer shell, the cover, of a book. Within this binding there is a space for the users own configuration of content. Multiple Possible content formulations exist as the user navigates the exhibition space, selecting printed matter relating only to their favoured work, or simply relying on their impulsive selection to gather the content for their own loose-leaf book. As the exhibition goes on, and the events programme starts to unravel more content becomes available, and so the possibilities for the users personal publication fluctuates, and becomes temporal, again a tinkering with this idea of limited editions, distributed forms and publishing as a medium"

Organised by MA Curating Contemporary Art students at the Royal College of Art, the project is funded by Arts Council England through Wysing Arts Centre’s Escalator Programme. 
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