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: The Italic I


Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton have received funding from the Arts Council of England - Grants for the Arts to develop a series of exhibitions and performances entitled The Italic I.

The Italic I is a collaborative interdisciplinary project by Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, comprising new sculptural, time-based and textual works for exhibition, animated by a series of live events. Within The Italic I, Cocker and Thornton approach the gallery as gymnasium, a training space for exploring the different states of potential made possible through voluntarily surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. The Italic I involves an attempt to slow and extend the duration of falling in order to suspend and elaborate upon its discrete phases or scenes, which in turn sheds light on the process of artistic collaboration itself and the making of meaning within creative labour.

We are seeking new vocabularies for reflecting on the labour within artistic practice. We address states of ‘not knowing’ within the creative process focusing on the act of collaboration itself as a site of desirable negotiation. We are striving to find the means for speaking about the experience of practice, wrestling with the idea of what it is to collaborate. The motif of the fall becomes the foil through which to reflect on the undisclosed, unnamed, or even invisible episodes within artistic endeavour, the various tipping points between thinking and action. Falling. Artistic Labour. Over and over, beginning again and again, repeating gestures, not for the perfection of a given move but rather moves towards deeper understanding.

Cocker and Thornton are currently developing a series of exhibitions and performances of The Italic I to be presented 2014 – 2016 at: Project Space Plus, Lincoln (November 2014), Tertulia, Bristol (2015) and Bonington Gallery, Nottingham (2016)

 Forthcoming:
We are currently working on a book chapter entitled "The Italic I: Towards a Lexicon for Reflecting on the Arc of Falling" for the publication Fall Narratives: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (eds.) Áine Larkin and Zohar Hadromi-Allouche. The chapter develops the concerns of the paper we presented at the conference of the same title in June at the University of Aberdeen.