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

Exhibition: Documents, Alternatives



Clare Thornton and I are presenting work from our ongoing collaboration The Italic I, as part of the unfolding curatorial project Documents, Alternatives (2017 – 2018). The Italic I is a collaborative enquiry for exploring the different states of potential made possible through purposefully surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. Parallel to performance and its visual documents, The Italic I has involved the production of a textual lexicon for reflecting on the different episodes within falling, generated through the ‘free-fall’ of conversational exchange. An attempt is made to slow and extend the duration of falling in order to elaborate upon its various phases or ‘scenes’. For Documents, Alternatives, at Airspace Gallery, Cocker and Thornton present a slowly looping text-work developed in dialogue with creative technologist Dane Watkins. 


Documents, Alternatives is curated by Ang Bartram and develops the curatorial concerns initiated within The Alternative Document, 2016, an exhibition and symposium staged at ProjectSpacePlus, Lincoln, 2015. Documents, Alternatives will unfold over a series of exhibitions and symposia including at Airspace Gallery (Stoke on Trent): 17 November – 16 December 2017; Verge Gallery, Sydney, 18 January - 24 February); B-Side Gallery (Bath Spa University): 20 April – 11 May 2018; ONCA Gallery (Brighton) as part of Brighton Digital Festival: 21 September – 8 October 2018.