Lit Fest: Wasted Books exhibition
TicketsWe 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.
Scattered throughout the Library, for the duration of The London Library Lit Fest and beyond, are twenty-one book sculptures by artist 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.
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.
The exhibition will be on view throughout the festival to members and tours of this and our Painting Women Writers exhibition will run from the Library Issue Hall at 6.30pm on 27, 28, 29 April and on 30th April from 11.15 & 11.30am, 1.15 & 1.30pm, 3.15 & 3.30pm and 5.15 & 5.30pm. Entry to the exhibitions is free but tickets are essential.
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