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.

Project: Kobitadihi... Visual Poetry Anthology



I have been invited by writer, curator and editor Philip Davenport to contribute work to a new international visual poetry anthology, curated by American poet Karl Kempton. The anthology is India's first online visual text art blog, with posts starting to appear online in Spring 2017, and will feature visual text arts such as visual poetry, minimalist poetry, book art, mail art, word painting, contemporary calligraphy, word sculpture, visual text centered collage, visual text centered photography, mathematical poetry and other kindred expressions. Examples of my own work within the anthology will include art-writing comprised of dense prose-poetry paragraphs; a fragmentary poetics produced through ‘close reading’ practised as visual magnification; ‘conversation as material’ - a collaborative approach using distilled transcription for producing an immanent, infrapersonal mode of writing-without-writing; alongside artistic research addressing the knowing-thinking-feeling emerging through the deviation between expanded writing, drawing and choreographic practices.