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.

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.