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.

Project: Dumb Fixity



Over the next year, I am planning to work with artists McCormack+Gent in relation to their ongoing project, Dumb Fixity, with the view to (hopefully) developing some new writing.  
Dumb Fixity arose from a desire to measure an abstract set of phenomena, working on the premise that things can speak and to find a means of hearing what they are telling us. The first question was how we could negate the subjective interpretations of our human perspective, if we could transcend our human desire to name, label, and categorise matter and meaning. 

The answer was that it is impossible: there is no avoiding our disadvantaged position of being human; we cannot escape comprehending and defining the world through our language. How then do we hear a shared language of the mountain, the fox or the lamp? We had to take another tack. This investigation is a process of fixity, an attempt to plot the proximities, connections, and allegiances of things, and trace the associations of their auras.” McCormack+Gent