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.

Performance: Re- (RITE)

Re - was a performance reading developed collaboratively by Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, to mark the launch of the publication RITE, at PSL (Project Space Leeds) on 26 March 2010. 


Re-
Drawing on Emma Cocker's Re: Writing 1993-2009 as a point of departure, Re- is a collaborative reading where Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker repeat, rework, rewrite, reread and react, whilst responding to and relocating ideas generated from, through and in relation to RITE. The reading presses on two writers - and two writing practices- coming together, whilst focusing on the tension between the improvised and rehearsed, and on the play between the visible and invisible, or public and private states of not knowing within the performed act of writing.

The disparate fragments of documentation (below) reflect upon different elements of Re-, intimating towards the potential for further (re)iterations or versions of the work, the possibility of future (re)adings.



Documentation: Stills from the video from the performance reading Re- (2010). 
                                   
Documentation: Video excerpts of the 'work' produced during the performance reading Re- 


   
   Documentation: Screen grabs from the video (detail) from the performance reading Re- 
          
Documentation: Video excerpts (detail) from the performance reading Re- (2010)

Documentation: 'Script/score' from the performance reading Re- (2010)