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

Web work: The Italic I



Work in progress: A new text-based web work emerging from the collaborative project The Italic I with Clare Thornton, developed with Dane Watkins. In this work, we present our 16 stage textual lexicon devised for reflecting on the arc of a repeated fall as a slow moving graphic, periodically interrupted by additional moments of textual and visual annotation. The lexicon comprises the following categories: Testing (the) ground — setting up the conditions; Opening attempt — warming and flexing; Entering the arc — trust, twist, torque; A commitment made — working against impulse; Voluntary vertigo — ilinx, inclination; Becoming diagonal — the italic I; Touching limits — tilt towards (the other); Embodiment/disembodiment — mind body partition; Formless — horizontality; Letting go — a liquid state; Ecstatic impotency — the jouissance of impuissance; Folding of attention — a heightened subjectivity; Gravity/levity — striking the right balances; Breathless —  ventilating the idea; Voluptuous recovery — return, yet charged; Recalibrate … loop — desire to repeat. More on this project to follow soon.



New writing: duration, attention, repetition



During September, I will be undertaking ‘field-work’ for a new body of writing and image-making exploring ideas around duration, attention and repetition. The context will be Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where I will be working in parallel to UK endurance swimmer and tri-athlete Jim Kersey, who will be undertaking to swim the length of the lake over a 24-hour (day and night) period. More details to follow.

Event: The Italic I at Counter



ClareThornton and I were participating in the Counter Book Fair, which takes place at Plymouth University on Saturday 29th October, 12 – 6 pm. We presented book-works from our shared and respective practices, as well as a new web based text-work related to our project The Italic I, developed in collaboration with Dane Watkins. The full list of exhibitors can be found here.

Keiken Collective engaging with our new webwork @ Counter

Writing: Study Scores



I have been invited to contribute a text to a forthcoming publication produced in conjunction with a solo exhibition by artist Kayt Hughes. The exhibition is the culmination of a year long Fellowship awarded to Kayt as part of winning the prestigious Woon Sculpture Prize. A Nottingham Trent fine art graduate, Kayt won the prize for Study Scores, 2nd Movement (foreground in image above), a sculptural work inspired by playing of ‘wrong notes’ within musical improvisation. 

The new body of work developed during the Fellowship explores the similarities of sculpture making and a child’s investigation of the physical world. Hughes investigates materials’ properties with naivety, to extend their purpose and their potential to interact with one another. The objects make improvised gestures, with consideration to form, material and colour, constructing provisional and transitioning installations.
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