'Like all men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs.' - Jorge Luis Borges
The library is a site of infinite possibilities. All who journey there find themselves in different lands, with different borders, stories, languages and inhabitants. Artists who travel through the library forge new paths that cross the terrain and intersect the roads already mapped by scientists, historians and academics. They navigate by chance and intuition as much as by reference and catalogue, giving different voices to collections through a new poetic reordering.
This exhibition traces the journeys of two such artists, Peter Lyssiotis and John Wolseley. As recipients of the inaugural State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowships in 2003-04, they ventured into the Library’s collections of rare books, monographs, pictures and maps. As they investigated, uncovered, created and recreated, many conversations arose, between historical texts and contemporary ideas, between art and nature, and between ancient civilizations and current global politics.
While each artist worked independently, a number of related ideas run through their completed works. Central to both their projects are notions of loss and retrieval, travel and time. The library houses memories, fragments of lost civilisations, descriptions of vanished cities and images of extinct or threatened animals and plants. In some cases, these are the only evidence of what has gone before us.
Peter Lyssiotis' artist's book
A Gardener at Midnight: Travels in the Holy Land revisits the ways in which Western travellers have traditionally recorded their encounters with the Holy Lands and their peoples. Central to this project are the Library's holdings of European travellers' tales of these 'exotic' destinations.
Produced within the context of the war in Iraq and the Middle East as a site of ongoing conflict, A Gardener at Midnight re-imagines the journey described in David Roberts’ The Holy Land: Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia (1842-49) as a journey across post-war Iraq. A ‘deluxe elephant folio’ in a limited edition of 10 copies, Lyssiotis’ work also references the scale and production methods of Roberts’ and other European travel books in the Library’s holdings.
Sitting on shifting ground, somewhere between fact and fiction, A Gardener at Midnight presents two fabulist texts accompanied by ‘unreal’ images. Details surrounding their authorship are deliberately kept mysterious.
John Wolseley's works on paper
An artist who works with nature as well as books, John Wolseley has drawn on the archives of the Library to expand his frames of reference. Throughout the three decades since he immigrated from England, Wolseley has observed, mapped and journeyed through the Australian landscape. His large-scale drawings, paintings and prints reflect a passionate engagement with the environment and a curiosity about its relationship to the self.
John Wolseley sees the connections between living things and the patterns that these create as greater than the things themselves. His adventures in the State Library took him on a number of unexpected but interrelated journeys, as each idea triggered new lines of inquiry. While he set out to investigate and re-interpret the representation of Australian land, animals and plant life by early European artists, his travels also took him to territories as seemingly unconnected as the history of wire fencing and the poetry of John Shaw Neilson. Weaving these together were, in fact, the regular forays that Wolseley took during this time into the bush, in particular to Victoria’s Mallee district.
New works were created as a result of these intellectual and physical journeys, and dialogues set up between the archive and the natural world, between the present and the past, and between representation and reality.
Illustrations
Top: Peter Lyssiotis and John Wolseley at the State Library of Victoria, August 2005
Middle: John William Lewin, Waty-face Honey-sucker from A Natural History of the Birds of New South Wales, 1822, from earlier drawing
Bottom: Charles Young, A Short Treatise on the System of Wire Fencing, Gates, etc, 1850
Bottom: Corneille Le Bruyn, A Voyage to the Levant, or Travels in the principal parts of Asia Minor..., 1702
Photography: Emilee Seymour
