On Wednesday 12th July there will be a re-hang of the sculptural 'Wasted Books' exhibition by artist Jacqueline Nicholls as we welcome the works from the Art Library into the Art Reading Room.

There will be some disruption in the Art Reading Room for the hanging of the works on the 12th July, however the room will remain open and accessible to all members throughout the day. 

There will be a total of twenty-one sculptural works by Jacqueline Nicholls, each taking their form from the different ways that books carry this ambiguity and transform. Some show how earlier readers have left their trace, marking the once pristine book with their ghostly presences. And some push the definition of a book to the limit. 

Disintegrating to a stage of disrepair, while retaining their essential ‘bookness’, each book sculpture plays with a fragment from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, the text merging into the form of the book. 

We do not receive our culture untainted; it comes to us laden with the attitudes, contexts and perspectives of the past and we can be left with the complexity of grappling with work that is beautiful yet damaged. And damaging. TS Eliot’s writing, full of illusions, fragments and multiple voices, is profoundly poetic, but it can also be deeply discomforting.

Jacqueline Nicholls is an artist, award-winning visual poet, and cultural events producer. Her art practice explores writing systems, and books as objects. This interest is informed by her Jewish heritage, a tradition that values scholarly word-play as a sacred act. Jacqueline has exhibited internationally, and her work is held in public and private collections. Artist residencies include Beit Venezia in Venice, Italy, and Manchester University Jewish Studies Department’s project ’50 Jewish Objects’. Jacqueline has an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins.