Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University. Emma's research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’ therein. Her practice unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches, alongside a mode of ‘contiguous writing’ — a way of writing-with that seeks to touch upon rather than being explicitly about. Her writing is 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; Reading/Feeling, 2013; 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.

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.