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.

Research Collaboration: Beyond the Line (Part 1)


Between 2 - 7 December 2013, I was working in Vienna at WUK with artist Nikolaus Gansterer and choreographer Mariella Greil on the pilot phase of a project entitled Beyond the Line, developing a working methodology for exploring ideas around interdisciplinary collaboration. Beyond the Line was conceived as ‘test-bed’ for exploring collaborative methods for working between and beyond the disciplinary lines of drawing, dance and writing. Ideas and working processes emerging from Beyond the Line will be developed further as part of a 3-year collaborative research project between myself, Gansterer and Greil entitled Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line 2014 – 2017 (funded by the Austrian Program for Arts-based Research, PEEK).