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: The Italic I – development.



The Italic I is an artistic enquiry developed in collaboration with Clare Thornton, for exploring the states of potential made possible by purposefully surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. A recent Arts Council Grant (2014 – 2016), enabled Clare and I to develop, test and stage this enquiry as a series of exhibitions, including a solo show at Project Space Plus, Lincoln (2014) and participate in the group exhibition The Alternative Document (2016). We are now developing this project further as a web-work in collaboration with Dane Watkins specifically exploring the animation of our textual lexicon for reflecting on the arc of falling, and a practice-based journal article for a forthcoming Special Issue (ed. Ang Bartram) of the Journal of Studies in Theatre and Performance exploring ideas around liveness and the lens, addressing the expanded modalities of performance and performativity - those emergent temporalities and subjectivities - produced at the threshold where live and lens meet.  

Images: Stills from Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, The Italic I, video/performance reading