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.

Writing: Kinesthetic Universe


Images: Victoria Gray, from Universe II and Universe III, 2013

I have been invited to produce a new piece of writing in parallel to Kinesthetic Universe, a forthcoming film by artist Victoria Gray. Gray makes live work that is located between performance and sculpture; performances that are sculptures and sculptures that are performances. Using minimal materials, primarily the body, the work explores the politics of movement and ways in which sociocultural factors inscribe and exert control over the body. Through performance actions, the work considers how the body might be antagonistic and resistant to dominant techniques of corporeal inscription, silencing and subordination. More to follow soon.