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: Choreo-graphic Figures: Method Lab

Below are some images from the Choreo-graphic Figures. Deviations from the Line ‘Method Lab’ which is currently taking place in Vienna. Choreo-graphic Figures. Deviations from the Line is a research project that I am working on in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil, and supported by the input of "sputniks" Alex Arteaga and Lilia Mestre.


The key methodological framework for the research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line is the ‘Method Laboratory’ – a dedicated allocation of space/time during which the key researchers and invited guests will come together geographically in one place to practice thinking-moving relationally; to discuss and develop both singular and sharable forms of practice-as-research. The methodology is exclusively based on a practice-as-research approach exploring epistemology as a ‘choreo-graphic’ figure woven through with the ‘practice of theory’. 


The Method Labs are conceived as ‘relational environments’ for thinking in-and-with practice, a ‘making space’ or the making of space (and time, mental and actual) dedicated to the process of exploration and experimentation. Dialogic exchange is a fundamental part of the method lab, for exploring points of connectivity (a shared lexicon and philosophy) in relation to the research project questions, and for sharing the process and technics (technologies, techniques, tactics) of enquiry rather than for the production of resolved works or definitive outcomes. More information about the Method Labs can be found here, and the project can be "followed" on Facebook here.



Images: top to bottom;  Mariella Greil and Emma Cocker engaged in a Live Exploration; Mariella Greil, Nikolaus Gansterer and Lilia Mestre engaged in a Live Exploration; Middle - Nikolaus Gansterer, Alex Arteaga, Mariella Greil and Emma Cocker engaged in conversation around the relation between "figure" and "figuring"; Bottom: Method Lab reading. Photographs by Simona Koch and Mariella Greil.