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.

Event: Open Studios






21 – 22 November 11.00 – 16.00, Open Studios at Exchange Place - presenting my own writing about, in parallel to and as art practice. Examples above including 'Re-Writing' in RITE, 'Close Reading' in The Other Room Anthology, 'Seeing Shadows' in Seers-in-Residence, '[...]' in Beginnings, 'Infinite' in Everything is so  Infinite, 'Room for Manoeuvre, or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins', in Manual for Marginal Places. Artists' books additionally presented included Performing the City, The Italic I, Manual, Open City. This annual event provided an opportunity for reflecting on different tactics of writing operating in my own practice: serial forms of prose-poetry written in dialogue with others' practice, conversation-as-material - collaborative dialogue distilled into poetic fragments, 'close reading' - acts of looking at language close up through visual magnification, performance and performative writing, strategies of listing, extraction and appropriation, scripts and scores.