Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University. Emma's research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’ therein. Her practice unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches, alongside a mode of ‘contiguous writing’ — a way of writing-with that seeks to touch upon rather than being explicitly about. Her writing is 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; Reading/Feeling, 2013; 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.

Writing: Reading Towards Becoming Causal



Reading/Feeling is a new publication based on a series of international reading groups linked to the Amsterdam based project If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution (IICD). Building on intellectual paradigms such as performativity, theatricality and feminism(s), it interrogates ideas of affect in relation to art practice, the construction of subjectivity and the politics of identity. At the invitation of IICD, I hosted a reading group at Site Gallery in Sheffield (February - May 2012), concurrently with reading groups in Amsterdam (led by Tanja Badoin) and Toronto (led Jacob Korczynski). Reading/Feeling brings together a collection of texts interrogated within these reading groups, alongside a number of framing texts / position essays from the reading group facilitators. Reading/Feeling follows the model of a previously published reader, (Mis)reading Masquerades
, (eds.) Frédérique Bergholtz  and Iberia Pérez
, produced by IICD in collaboration with Dutch Art Institute and Piet Zwart Institute, and will be launched as part of a symposium in Amsterdam in January. Below is my text 'Reading Towards Becoming Causal' which will be published as one of the introductory essays for this publication.