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. 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; 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. 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.

Research event: SARN Parenthesis

In November I presented a performance presentation (in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil) as part of 'Parenthesis', an un-conference organised by SARN (Swiss Artistic Research Network), taking place at HEAD, Geneva University of Art and Design, 6-7 November 2014. In our presentation (see documentation below) we shared findings from our research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, by presenting a 'version' of the project's 'Method Lab' in the form of a hybrid lecture involving live performance, drawing and the spoken word.





Documentation of installation as part of SARN. Photographs: Emma Cocker.

Below are further details and the full programme for the SARN (Swiss Artistic Research Network) unconference.



Exhibition: The Italic I

The Italic I @ Project Space Plus,
Lincoln School of Fine & Performing Arts
3 – 14 November 2014


The Italic I is a collaborative interdisciplinary project by Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, comprising new sculptural, time-based and textual works for exhibition, animated by a series of live events. Within The Italic I, Cocker and Thornton approach the gallery as gymnasium, a training space for exploring the different states of potential made possible through voluntarily surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. The Italic I involves an attempt to slow and extend the duration of falling in order to suspend and elaborate upon its discrete phases or scenes, which in turn sheds light on the process of artistic collaboration itself and the making of meaning within creative labour.







Images: The Italic I, Emma Cocker and Clare Thorton, project space plus, Lincoln, 2014. Photography: 1-3 Emma Cocker, 4: Tom Hemming.

 Event Programme
In the second week of exhibition, The Italic I will be animated by a series of live events including live performance actions. a performance reading and publication launch, and a reading group. The artists will also be working in the space at specific times.

Launch Event + Performance Reading
Tuesday 11 November: 17.30 – 19.30, 18.00 Performance Reading
In conjunction with their exhibition The Italic I at project space plus, Cocker and Thornton have produced an artists’ publication, which they will also present in the form of a performance reading. Booking advised. http://theitalici.eventbrite.co.uk

Reading Group
Tuesday 11 November, 11.00 – 12.00
Cocker and Thornton will host a reading group focusing on extracts from Erin Manning’s, Relationscapes: Movement, Art and Philosophy (2012) as a means for generating discussion around the ideas and concerns relating to their current exhibition. Booking advised. http://theitalici-readinggroup.eventbrite.co.uk

The Italic I is supported through funding by the Arts Council of England - Grants for the Arts.

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