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 in progress: Choreo-graphic Figures



Between 2 – 9 February 2017, I was working at Zentrum Fokus Forschung in Vienna, with Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil and designer Simona Koch, on the final content, layout and graphic design of our forthcoming book, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line. The publication is conceived as a studio-laboratory in itself, drawing together critical reflections and experimental practices that focus on the how-ness — the qualitative-processual, aesthetic-epistemological and ethico-empathetic dynamics — within shared artistic exploration, directing attention to an affective realm of forces and intensities operating before, between and beneath the more readable gestures of artistic practice. Hybrid of an artists-book and research compendium, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line invokes action by operating as a 'score' that can be activated by others, providing artists, theorists and creative practitioners with a modular system of performative and notational tools for future experimental play. More on the publication and related launch events to follow.
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Book Launch and Lecture: The Yes of the No



Tuesday 24 January, 6.30 PM – 8 PM
Site Gallery, Sheffield

Emma Cocker, The Yes of the No
Book launch — with a reading at 7 PM
Join Site for the book launch and a reading of The Yes of the No, the first collection of writing by Emma Cocker (published by Site Gallery, 2016). Existing in the space between imaginative proposition and a call to action, The Yes of
 the No is an assemblage of provocations, proposals and potential ways of operating
 — ranging from navigating the city and inhabiting the margins to errant acts of reading; from preparing for the unexpected 
to learning how to ‘not know’, from minor acts of singular sedition to collective expressions of an insurgent ‘we’.

Tuesday 24 January, 4.30 PM – 6 PM
Sheffield Hallam University, Pennine Theatre, City Campus
Transmission Lecture
Prior to the book launch, Emma Cocker will give a lecture about the wider context of her practice as a writer-artist, as part of the Transmission Lecture Series, a series of free art lectures produced by Site Gallery in collaboration with Sheffield Hallam University’s Fine Art Department. 

Symposium: Analysis of Process


Image: Phil Cosker

I have been invited to chair this forthcoming symposium which explores the idea of process and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Analysis of Process
A one-day symposium  
13 January 2017 10:00am - 4pm
The Collection and Usher Gallery Lincoln 

Analysis of Process explores cross-disciplinary approaches to creative practice seen through theatre & film design, writing, curation, and fine art practices. 
  • Where is common ground found and where is difference?
  • How is the process of developing ideas and making artefacts different in our disciplines and how does it pull us together?
  • What, and how do we share? 
  • When we find overlaps between us how does this redefine our own work?
  • How can we work together jointly in the development of creative outcomes and why would we want to do that?
  • Why are there seemingly artificial boundaries constructed around different creative disciplines?  

Organised by the Waddington Cultural Collective (WCC)
To book email: Ashley.Gallant@lincolnshire.gov.uk (free event but booking is essential)

Publication: Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line



Between 10 – 13 November, I was working at WUK, in Vienna with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil, alongside designer Simona Koch, on the content for our forthcoming publication from the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line. Below are a couple of in-progress pages from the publication, as well as documentation of us working together at WUK. The book is due to be published in Spring 2017. More information in due course here. 






Symposium: Showing and Writing Training


On Showing and Writing Training: A Symposium
Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance
Royal Holloway, University of London
Wednesday, 30 November 
14:00 to 17:00 

What is the difference between what you do and how you talk about what you do?
What remains unsaid? What remains undone? What gets undone?
What is impossible to explain?
Who do you think you're talking to?

The special issue of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 'On Showing and Writing Training' (eds.) Dick McCaw and guest-editor Mary Paterson, brings together writing, improvisation, experimentation and images to explore how performance is made manifest, represented and reproduced through training. In doing so, the journal addresses wider questions about pedagogy, the live and the remembered in relation to the practices of art. This afternoon of discussions aims to celebrate the special issue and further explore these ideas. The event will feature an artist's response from the performer Karen Christopher, as well as talks and provocations from John Hall, Franc Chamberlain, Ysabel Clare, Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, Joa Hug and other contributors. 



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