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. She was a key-researcher within the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) for exploring the thinking-feeling-knowing between choreography, drawing and writing. 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; 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.

Publication: infinite


My publication infinite, part of the series Lemonade everything was so infinite., published by LemonMelon is now available here.

infinite 
Emma Cocker
LemonMelon 2013 | £5 | Softback | 29 x 21 cm | ISBN 978 1 908260 07 9
There are thousands of books in the British Library whose title refers to the act of searching. There are at least as many books referring to loss. The infinite cycle of searching and losing, losing and searching, might be conceived from two different perspectives: (from left-to-right) in Sisyphean terms, akin to the rolling of a rock to the top of the hill only to roll back down again, or else (from right-to-left) as a model of Penelopian labour, like the endless unraveling of a weave such that by morning the task can begin afresh.

More about the publication series
Lemonade everything was so infinite.
'Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos.' was one of Franz Kafka's last sentences in his Aus den Gesprächsblättern published in Briefe 1902–1924. Hélène Cixous, who repeatedly wrote about this sentence, translated it as 'Limonade tout était si infini.'. This is translated in the english version of the Hélène Cixous Reader as 'Lemonade everything was so infinite'.

Cixous's translation of Kafka's sentence 'Lemonade everything was so infinite.' forms the basis of a series of seven titles written by seven different writers / artists – David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Rachel Lois Clapham, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood and Mary Paterson. Each title explores one of the seven segments of this sentence – 'Lemonade', ' __', 'everything', 'was', 'so', 'infinite', '.'. This form of publishing does not only aim to investigate Cixous's translation of the sentence, but also intends to explore the grammatical connection of the different elements within the sentence, the possible interconnectivity / collaboration of the different voices, the words in their own grammatically disconnected function etc ...