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

Research Enquiry: Dorsal Practices (in-person)

In early April 2024, I was in Totnes working with Katrina Brown, as part of our ongoing collaboration Dorsal Practices. Specifically, we were working on how we might now evolve our project through different forms of sharing (with others) including live activations of our ‘dorsal practices’ (the three-fold relation of movement-based, conversation and experimental reading practices), as well as developing ideas for future publication. During the week, we were testing out how to bring our various practices into proximity through live activation within a studio space context, which we were also able to pilot with invited guests Rosanna Irvine and Mark Leahy. More about our collaboration Dorsal Practices can be found here.