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

Book Launch: Reading/Feeling




Above are images from the launch event that I organised at Site Gallery for the publication Reading/Feeling, a new reader that considers the meaning of affect in theory and artistic practice, programmed in conjunction with artist Anna Barham’s residency Suppose I Call a Man a Horse, or a Horse a Man? The publication Reading/Feeling draws together a selection of texts by theoreticians, artists and curators that were read in If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution’s reading groups taking place in Amsterdam, Sheffield and Toronto over the past two years, alongside newly commissioned essays from Tanja Baudoin, Emma Cocker, and Jacob Korczynski and contributions by reading group members including Stephen Bowler, Alison J Carr, Belen Cerezo, Victoria Gray, Linda Kemp, Hester Reeve and Julie Swallow. The Sheffield reading group took place at Site Gallery in dialogue with the exhibition Of All Possible Things by Jeremiah Day, who also contributed to the Reading/Feeling publication. Reading/Feeling was launched at Site Gallery with a series of readings and performance actions by members of the Sheffield reading group including myself, Hester Reeve, Allie Carr and Linda Kemp, alongside a performance reading by Anna Barham.