Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Operating under the title Not Yet There, Cocker's research focuses on the process of artistic exploration and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’ emerging therein; on models of (art) practice and subjectivity that resist the pressure of a single, stable position by remaining wilfully unresolved. Her mode of working unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to producing texts parallel to and as art practice. Cocker's recent 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; Reading/Feeling (Affect), 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, and as a solo collection entitled The Yes of the No, 2016.

Exhibition: Marbled Reams


The Modern Institute, Osborne Street, Glasgow, 01/12/2012—12/01/2013

Laura Aldridge, Aline Bouvy & John Gillis, Emma Cocker, KIMI CONRAD, Sean Cummins, Sean Edwards, Ed Fella, Heike-Karin Föll, Dan Ford, Babak Ghazi, Sam Gordon, Mark Harasimowicz, David L. Hayles, Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Matt Jamieson, Scott King, Jon Knight, Piotr Łakomy, Sara MacKillop, David Newey, David Osbaldeston, Anna Parkina, James Richards, James E Smith, Jack Strange, Steven Warwick, Jean-Michel Wicker.

'Marbled Reams' is a print project founded in 2009 by Glasgow based artist Tom Godfrey. The project started with the initial production of 12 reams and continues with new editions produced on a bi-monthly basis. Within The Modern Institute's ground floor vitrines, Godfrey will be installing a rotating display of all 23 Marbled Ream editions produced so far. The project is derived from an artwork produced by Godfrey (pictured) with the same title in 2007 where a ream of A4 paper was marbled along one edge and displayed on a glass shelf. Acknowledging the potential vested in a stack of blank paper,  the artwork has been developed into an editioning/ publishing project where artists are invited to produce a single or multiple A4 work that is photocopied onto an entire ream of paper. This is marbled along the front edge offering a shared origin for all 500 sheets, documented for the projects website, and then displayed in its entirety, highlighting the projects link with both printed matter and sculpture. Pages from the reams are available for £1 each and annual subscriptions are available for £18. http://www.marbledreams.com/


Writing: Reading Towards Becoming Causal



Reading/Feeling is a new publication based on a series of international reading groups linked to the Amsterdam based project If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution (IICD). Building on intellectual paradigms such as performativity, theatricality and feminism(s), it interrogates ideas of affect in relation to art practice, the construction of subjectivity and the politics of identity. At the invitation of IICD, I hosted a reading group at Site Gallery in Sheffield (February - May 2012), concurrently with reading groups in Amsterdam (led by Tanja Badoin) and Toronto (led Jacob Korczynski). Reading/Feeling brings together a collection of texts interrogated within these reading groups, alongside a number of framing texts / position essays from the reading group facilitators. Reading/Feeling follows the model of a previously published reader, (Mis)reading Masquerades
, (eds.) Frédérique Bergholtz  and Iberia Pérez
, produced by IICD in collaboration with Dutch Art Institute and Piet Zwart Institute, and will be launched as part of a symposium in Amsterdam in January. Below is my text 'Reading Towards Becoming Causal' which will be published as one of the introductory essays for this publication.

Publication: On Searching >> << On Losing


I am currently working with LemonMelon on my contribution to the publishing project Lemonade everything was so infinite. 
Infinite
There are thousands of books in the British Library whose title refers to the act of searching. There are at least as many books referring to loss. The infinite cycle of searching and then losing might be conceived from two different perspectives: (from left>to>right) in Sisyphean terms, akin to the rolling of a rock to the top of the hill only to roll back down again, or else (from right) as a model of Penelopian labour, like the endless unraveling of a weave such that by morning the task can begin afresh.
Lemonade everything was so infinite.
'Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos.' was one of Franz Kafka's last sentences in his Aus den Gesprächsblättern published in Briefe 1902–1924. Hélène Cixous, who repeatedly wrote about this sentence, translated it as 'Limonade tout était si infini.'. This is translated in the english version of the Hélène Cixous Reader as 'Lemonade everything was so infinite'. Cixous's translation of Kafka's sentence 'Lemonade everything was so infinite.' forms the basis of a series of seven titles written by seven different writers / artists – David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Rachel Lois Clapham, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood and Mary Paterson. Each title explores one of the seven segments of this sentence – 'Lemonade', ' __', 'everything', 'was', 'so', 'infinite', '.'. The titles will be published in succession every three months starting in July / August 2011 with Lemonade by David Berridge. This form of publishing does not only aim to investigate Cixous's translation of the sentence, but also intends to explore the grammatical connection of the different elements within the sentence, the possible interconnectivity / collaboration of the different voices, the words in their own grammatically disconnected function etc ... 

Taking the word infinite as a starting point my contribution addresses the endlessly cyclical relation between the act of searching and losing. The publication is proposed as a dual-directional pamphlet, readable from left to right and right to left.

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