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

Dialogue: Misstep



Rose Butler, Misstep (work in progress). Choreographer: Alexander Whitley; dancer: Natalie Allen

I have been invited into dialogue with artist Rose Butler in relation to her new work Misstep, with the view to developing new writing / collaborative artists’ publication. With reference to Edison's early film of the butterfly dance, Misstep considers shifts in non-linear temporality combined with a change in traditional point of view from one that we would associate with being grounded to one that is in flight and from above. The work comprises dance phrases choreographed by Alexander Whitley with dancer Natalie Allen, filmed in slow motion for forthcoming installation at The Lowry January 2016 and then be shown on FACT's interactive TILO screen in Liverpool.