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.

Text: Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected



Below is my essay Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected commissioned for the forthcoming publication, On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (eds.) Rebecca Fortnum and Elizabeth Fisher (Black Dog Publishing, 2013), which will be presented alongside two collaborative artists' pages (The Italic I, from my collaboration with Clare Thornton, and Re-  performance extracts from my collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham). More details on the publication to follow soon.