200x200mm, 10 Pages, 10 Images, Full colour, Softcover, fold-out cover, speciality papers throughout, 2014.

The Italic I is a practice-based collaboration between writer-artist Emma Cocker and interdisciplinary artist Clare Thornton that explores the different states of potential made possible through purposefully surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. Rather than an accidental occurrence encountered by chance, within our artistic investigation falling is apprehended consciously as a training exercise for mind and muscle, tested out in physical, cognitive, and even linguistic terms.

Within The Italic I the act of falling is slowed and extended through the use of both lens and language, as a means for attending to its discrete phases or scenes. This publication comes from a performative-poetic enquiry, comprising photographic performance-documents presented alongside a textual lexicon generated in the 'free-fall' of conversational exchange. The publication is not conceived as documentation (of a performance), but rather as a performative enactment of there enquiry, an exercise companion. They approached the production of this publication as a form of training in and of itself, requiring a specific physical and conceptual practice undertaken towards building — increasing and deepening — there collaborative capacity. Less a step-by-step manual for instructing another on how to fall, they propose the publication The Italic I as a spur or prompt for cultivating a willfully non-corrective tendency in thought, for operating against expectation.

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