Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University. Emma's research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’ therein. Her practice unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches, alongside a mode of ‘contiguous writing’ — a way of writing-with that seeks to touch upon rather than being explicitly about. Her writing is 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, 2013; 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.

Book Launch: Reading/Feeling




Above are images from the launch event that I organised at Site Gallery for the publication Reading/Feeling, a new reader that considers the meaning of affect in theory and artistic practice, programmed in conjunction with artist Anna Barham’s residency Suppose I Call a Man a Horse, or a Horse a Man? The publication Reading/Feeling draws together a selection of texts by theoreticians, artists and curators that were read in If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution’s reading groups taking place in Amsterdam, Sheffield and Toronto over the past two years, alongside newly commissioned essays from Tanja Baudoin, Emma Cocker, and Jacob Korczynski and contributions by reading group members including Stephen Bowler, Alison J Carr, Belen Cerezo, Victoria Gray, Linda Kemp, Hester Reeve and Julie Swallow. The Sheffield reading group took place at Site Gallery in dialogue with the exhibition Of All Possible Things by Jeremiah Day, who also contributed to the Reading/Feeling publication. Reading/Feeling was launched at Site Gallery with a series of readings and performance actions by members of the Sheffield reading group including myself, Hester Reeve, Allie Carr and Linda Kemp, alongside a performance reading by Anna Barham.