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.

Publication: A 16 Stage Lexicon on the Arc of Falling


‘The Italic I – A 16 Stage Lexicon on the Arc of Falling’, an article and artists’ pages by Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming special issue of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT), on Showing and Writing Training, (ed.) Mary Paterson (publication date, 2016).

About the issue: This special issue of TDPT is concerned as much with form as it is with content, interested in the ways that discourse and dialogue about training affect not only training and its stated aims, but also the ways in which these methods and devices are accessed, remembered or reproduced. Questions posed by this issue include: What is the difference between what you do and how you talk about what you do? Who is unwelcome and how do they know? What remains unsaid? What remains undone? What gets undone? Would you say all this to someone you are training with? What kinds of discourses are (in)credible? What have you already assumed? What is impossible to explain?  What can only be known in retrospect? How does it feel? What kind of person is produced by this process and how will they talk? What is (in)substantial? What will change if we do things the same way we talk about them?  What will happen if we don’t? What will change if we don’t change anything that we’re doing right now? What is impossible to articulate in words? What are the secrets of your method? How do you know you belong somewhere? Who do you think you are talking to?

 Below is an extract central artists' page from our article, ‘The Italic I – A 16 Stage Lexicon on the Arc of Falling’.