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.

Publication: Ways to Wander


I will have a text-work included as part of the forthcoming publication Ways to Wander
: A Footwork [1] compendium of suggestions, instructions, rules and activities for walking. Edited by Claire Hind and Clare Qualmann (
Footwork/Walking Artists Network). More details to follow soon.

Ways to Wander
 - an interdisciplinary catalogue of ways to engage with walking from simple ideas to complex instructions, philosophical musings to playful encounters. Inspired by the multi-disciplinary approaches and experiences of the Footwork research group, and by Professor Carl Lavery’s ‘25 Instructions for Performance in Cities’ [2], this compendium aims to assemble a series of short texts that can be used to construct, interact with, or be encountered on a walk. The text may be for any location: urban, suburban or rural, or it could be site and/or route specific. Contributions may offer an improvised experience, or a more structured task. The context may be geological, environmental, historical, autobiographical, pedagogical, political, playful, spiritual, critical, or any combination of these.

[1] Footwork is a research group attached to the Walking Artists Network, 

[2] Lavery, C., 2005, ‘Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities.’ Studies in Theatre and Performance, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 229-238.

Project: Walking from Scores


Postcard No.5 - a text work from my collaboration with Open City (Andrew Brown, Katie Doubleday, Simone Kenyon - and originally commissioned as part of NottDance'07) is going to be included as part of a project entitled Walking from Scores by Elena Biserna.

Walking from Scores is a collection of old and newly commissioned scores and sets of instructions by artists involving walking, listening and sounding in urban space. Starting from Biserna’s ongoing investigation on the relationship between expanded sound and the everyday sphere, the projects focuses on artists' scores – conceived as catalysts for action following the tradition of Fluxus event scores – and on walking and moving – conceived as a way to establish a dialectical relation with the everyday and the context. The title is an appropriation of Ken Friedman's text Working from Scores, originally published in 1990. In this text, Friedman introduced his notion of “musicality” in visual art and intermedia, interrogating ideas of “authenticity”, “intention” and “meaning” and understanding the artwork as a set of instructions that allows a constellation of different interpretations. Embracing this open approach, the project consists in a scattered intervention in the 3-day long event Catacomb Bomb curated by Xing in several venues in Bologna. Scores and instructions by: G. Douglas Barrett, George Brecht, Cornelius Cardew, Stephen Chase, Hugh Davies, Bill Diez, Francesco Gagliardi, Christopher Hobbs, Dennis Johnson, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, La Monte Young, Max Neuhaus, Paoline Oliveros, Michael Parson, Ben Patterson, Mark So, Davide Tidoni, Wolf Vostell (& more to be confirmed).

Project: The Italic I


Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton have received funding from the Arts Council of England - Grants for the Arts to develop a series of exhibitions and performances entitled The Italic I.

The Italic I is a collaborative interdisciplinary project by Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, comprising new sculptural, time-based and textual works for exhibition, animated by a series of live events. Within The Italic I, Cocker and Thornton approach the gallery as gymnasium, a training space for exploring the different states of potential made possible through voluntarily surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. The Italic I involves an attempt to slow and extend the duration of falling in order to suspend and elaborate upon its discrete phases or scenes, which in turn sheds light on the process of artistic collaboration itself and the making of meaning within creative labour.

We are seeking new vocabularies for reflecting on the labour within artistic practice. We address states of ‘not knowing’ within the creative process focusing on the act of collaboration itself as a site of desirable negotiation. We are striving to find the means for speaking about the experience of practice, wrestling with the idea of what it is to collaborate. The motif of the fall becomes the foil through which to reflect on the undisclosed, unnamed, or even invisible episodes within artistic endeavour, the various tipping points between thinking and action. Falling. Artistic Labour. Over and over, beginning again and again, repeating gestures, not for the perfection of a given move but rather moves towards deeper understanding.

Cocker and Thornton are currently developing a series of exhibitions and performances of The Italic I to be presented 2014 – 2016 at: Project Space Plus, Lincoln (November 2014), Tertulia, Bristol (2015) and Bonington Gallery, Nottingham (2016)

 Forthcoming:
We are currently working on a book chapter entitled "The Italic I: Towards a Lexicon for Reflecting on the Arc of Falling" for the publication Fall Narratives: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (eds.) Áine Larkin and Zohar Hadromi-Allouche. The chapter develops the concerns of the paper we presented at the conference of the same title in June at the University of Aberdeen.

Publication: Tripwire - a journal of poetics


I have been invited to contribute to a forthcoming issue of Tripwire, a journal of poetics. Tripwire, a journal of poetics, is devoted to a counter-institutional exploration of radical and experimental modes of contemporary poetics, art, and cultural politics. The journal was founded in 1998 by Yedda Morrison and David Buuck. Six issues were published between 1998-2002, with a special supplement published in September 2004 for the RNC protests in New York. Current and back issues are available here and through Small Press Distribution.

Tripwire 8 * CITIES
Contributors: Anne Boyer, Cecily Nicholson, MB, DH, Amy Balkin, Kaia Sand & Daniela Molnar, Ryan Eckes, Kim Hyesoon, Zarina, Scott Sørli, Michael Woods, Lucky Pierre, Grupo de Arte Callejero (trans. MR translation collective), Jonas Staal & Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Emma Cocker, Nancy Popp, Gonzalo Millan (trans. Annegret Nill), Dambudzo Marechera, Lucy Parsons, and a special feature from Oakland, featuring Oki Sogumi, Jill Richards, Lara Durback, Wendy Trevino, Joshua Clover, Mayakov+sky Platform, Jasper Bernes, Emji Spero, Erika Staiti, Kate Robinson, and more. December 2014. Buy here.


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