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: Dorsal Practices


In late November, I was working in Sheffield with choreographer Katrina Brown, further developing our collaborative research project Dorsal Practices. Though we have been working together since early 2020, this was really our first in-person exploration together (with the exception of us presenting a workshop and performance reading at the Sentient Performativities symposium in June 2022). Our shared exploration together in Sheffield including a live back-to-back process of ‘dorsal conversation’, a series of movement practices exploring walking backwards, leaning, and lying down, alongside working with filmmaker Leon Lockley to make a recording of a performance reading / reading practice based on previous transcript material from earlier conversations. An extract of the recording of the reading can be encountered here.