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.

Web work: The Italic I



Work in progress: A new text-based web work emerging from the collaborative project The Italic I with Clare Thornton, developed with Dane Watkins. In this work, we present our 16 stage textual lexicon devised for reflecting on the arc of a repeated fall as a slow moving graphic, periodically interrupted by additional moments of textual and visual annotation. The lexicon comprises the following categories: Testing (the) ground — setting up the conditions; Opening attempt — warming and flexing; Entering the arc — trust, twist, torque; A commitment made — working against impulse; Voluntary vertigo — ilinx, inclination; Becoming diagonal — the italic I; Touching limits — tilt towards (the other); Embodiment/disembodiment — mind body partition; Formless — horizontality; Letting go — a liquid state; Ecstatic impotency — the jouissance of impuissance; Folding of attention — a heightened subjectivity; Gravity/levity — striking the right balances; Breathless —  ventilating the idea; Voluptuous recovery — return, yet charged; Recalibrate … loop — desire to repeat. More on this project to follow soon.