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.

Conference: Fall narratives


Extending the concerns of Tacturiency (my ongoing collaboration with Clare Thornton), our proposed conference paper, The Italic I, has been accepted for the forthcoming conference on falling. In this proposed practice-based paper we explore the different states of potential made possible through voluntarily surrendering to the event of a repeated fall.

Fall narratives: an interdisciplinary perspective
18th-19th June 2014, University of Aberdeen, Scotland

The conference will examine the concept of the Fall across arange of disciplines and languages. The temporal scope extends from antiquity to contemporary times. Potential topics include:

Moral and philosophical Falls; Fall of angels (and demons); Religious falls; Literary falls; Cinematic falls; Contemporary falls: in finances, politics, media, sports, entertainment; Fall of empires: historical, economical, cultural; Fall of regimes; Fall of ideologies, ideas, world views, political/ religious movements; The linguistics of falling; The psychology of falling.