Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. 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?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

Dialogue: When Seams Become Audible



I was invited to engage in dialogue with artist Katharina Fitz, as part of a forthcoming publication  that she is producing in relation to her solo exhibition When Seams Become Audible, which was exhibited at One Thoresby Street, Nottingham (11 – 31 October 2021).


About the exhibition: “In her show Fitz presents a series of objects responding to the Attic Gallery at OTS, with the works on display being the result of a 6-week long residency. The turned, pushed, pulled and suspended forms work as a reactivation of their surroundings, beginning to interact with the architecture and challenging our understanding of how we experience space and everything that comes with it. Here Fitz offers an invitation to resee these places we inhabit through fresh eyes, creating a new kind of imagined and activated environment. The physical engagement of the body is notably present in Fitz’s practice and traces of her creative method draw us into an exploration of the making of the works on display, where tools and jigs become part of the installation. Fitz imports studio arrangements and objects of process into the gallery in order to bring the intimacy of the artist studio into the experience of the audience. In her installations she prompts the viewer to rethink the making of objects, the behaviour of the space and how it could be animated, changed, or extended into something else.”