Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. 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?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

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