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.

Exhibition: Essaying Essays at The Reading Room, Berlin



David Berridge’s ESSAYING ESSAYS: AN ASSEMBLING (which includes my text work 'To try, a Tentative Attempt') has been selected to be part of THE READING ROOM  project in Berlin, curated by Dominique Hurth and Ciarán Walsh 



 Emma Cocker, to try, a tentative attempt, 2010. Limited edition textwork.

Berridge’s proposal for THE READING ROOM explores how the form of the ESSAYING ESSAYS: AN ASSEMBLING publication occupied an overlapping space between print and online, magazine, exhibition and essay. For THE READING ROOM Berridge will be submitting the magazine as an unbound folio.


The Reading Room is based on former institutional “Reading Rooms” (such as the one of the British Museum in London), and functions as such: it will be open for public viewing, with those wanting to use it being required to make an appointment and also register beforehand their particular interested in the publications or project. The Reading Room takes its initial presentation location from the idea of the “Salon”, gathering its printed matters under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host. The visitors and readers of the Reading Room will ring the bell of a private apartment, climb up the stairs to it, and then be able to sit in a study room. Refreshments will be served. 

The organisers of The Reading Room will maintain a curated monthly selection of approximately 25 publications that can be seen at one time. Those will be chosen based on changing criteria, such as topics, size, colour, content, and links to each other. A monthly index will be published online. By special agreement, the remaining publications of the archive can of course be read and viewed, next to the monthly selection.

The Reading Room  is a project conceived and organised by Dominique Hurth and Ciarán Walsh.