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.

Event: Berthing Bone & MANUAL @ Bloc, Sheffield




Victoria Gray, Berthing Bone, still from digital video, 2014. 
Courtesy of the artist and Richard O’Hare.

Victoria Gray – Berthing Bone, Special Screening
Presented alongside the launch and a reading from the publication MANUAL 
Friday 09 May 2014
, 7-9pm
The reading will start at 7.30 and will last 45 min
Screening – 10 May 2014 – 12 – 6 pm

Bloc Projects is pleased to host a special screening of Berthing Bone by performance artist and writer Victoria Gray along with an accompanied reading by the artist in collaboration with writer-artist Emma Cocker. Often durational in length, Gray’s work is concerned with the politics of affective and kinaesthetic experience in the live encounter. Berthing Bone is a single-channel video work conceived as a durational series of performed sculptures for the hands. Through corporeal and moving-image based strategies of stillness, slowness and close proximity, the work explores incipient action, honing attention to the affective experience of movement before movement takes form.

The video is accompanied by MANUAL, a collaborative publication that includes texts by Gray and Cocker. Throughout the production process of Berthing Bone, Gray and Cocker met for dialogue, witnessing together the evolving process of the video work. Cocker’s writing reflects on ideas emerging through these encounters. Her text is not conceived as an explication of Berthing Bone, but rather as a set of exercises or thought-fragments imagined alongside. In turn, Gray’s text is a meditation on both the video and Cocker’s response, exercising the practice of attention that the original performance and Cocker’s text call forth. 


Berthing Bone was filmed on location at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Longside Gallery, Wakefield. Performance and direction by Victoria Gray; camera and post-production by Orillo Productions. The work has been funded by Arts Council England through the National Lottery and supported by Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Arts Council Collection. The publication MANUAL is supported by Nottingham Trent University. Designed by Joff + Ollie.

My contribution to the publication can also be read below: