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.

Being in the Midst: Per-forming Thinking in Action


Over the coming weeks I am giving a series of invited lectures with the title Being in the Midst: Per-forming Thinking in Action. This is the title of a book that I am ‘in the midst’ of working on, and I will be approaching these lectures as a context for ‘thinking through’ this title in relation to some of my recent projects and collaborations:

* Wednesday 30 January, Lincoln School of Art and Design
* Monday 4 March, York St. John University
* Wednesday 13 March, Derby University

The title echoes that of a research article that I published in 2016, which explores the relation between 'performing thinking' in action and performing 'thinking-in-action'. See article here. The notion of 'thinking in action' has been a recurring motif my research and writing over the last decade, and will continue to be turned over and over (in different ways) within some of my forthcoming research projects. More on this soon.