Curating Creative Acts

Creative Acts, the Library's latest exhibition, features new commissions by visionary Australian creators alongside collection highlights from the Library that trace the spiritual connections, rituals and deeply personal quests behind artistic practice.

We spoke with Michelle Moo, the Library’s Manager, Exhibitions and Experience Design, about what it was like to work on an exhibition of this scale.

Can you tell us about how Creative Acts came to be, and if there was a particular source of inspiration behind it?

One of our curators had a great idea for a show, then tentatively called Altered States, about the different states artists achieve and cultivate. She came across psychiatrist and author Annie Yoffa’s 1940s automatic drawings, of which we have over 4000 in the Library’s collection.  It became a springboard into the collection and the basis for the engagement of contemporary artist commissions. 

It’s great to see a breadth of artists and media represented in the commissioned works for the exhibition. How, and why, did you select the artists involved?

It took us a while to select the artists – we were looking for artists with a deep engagement with cultural and spiritual practices and systems built over a sustained period. We all dabble in things, which is lovely, but we were looking for people who have gone so much further than most of us, intrepid travellers in inner and outer realities who could guide us – thinking of the Hermit in the tarot deck: the practitioner who has gone within and carries their own light through unknown territories. 

There are more than 600 items in the exhibition. I'm sure that working on something of this scale was both exciting and challenging. What was it like to work on an exhibition of this scale?

It was hard not to have more! Seriously. In fact, a big part of curating is cutting down, distilling the idea and allowing meaning to congeal around a limited amount of objects. So this show, with its Wunderkammer design and its play on taxonomies, meant we could, in fact, if needed to, bring in more objects. With more than 6 million objects to choose from, we started, like you do, with the Library’s catalogue. We used search words, we consulted with librarians and collection curators, we viewed the objects, gathered by our storage team, in the Heritage Reading Room and other viewing spaces.  We were also doing research while working closely with our commissioned artists – exploring the collection with them to shed light on their practices. Each  section of the exhibition involved a deep journey into the collection. Object selection – and how this intersects (iteratively) with narrative and experience development – takes up most of the development time in our exhibitions. 

Could you give our readers a sense of how long it takes to put together an exhibition like Creative Acts?

Typically, and ideally, 18 months to 2 years. The first half is spent in the research, object selection, commissioning artworks and design. The second half is text writing, detailed design, object preparation, audio visual production, build and install.  It takes a dedicated project team of around 3 to 4 people who work with teams across the Library from Conservation to Digital to Marketing, as well as contractors, including designers, builders, lighting designers, audio-visual technical specialists and installers.  

You curated the exhibition glossary. Can you explain what that is, and how it provides context for the rest of the exhibition?

The glossary uses the collection to explore terms and ideas that are present in the show, much like a glossary you would find in a book, except that rather than definitional answers, the objects chosen ask us to explore the ideas. Sometimes fun, sometimes provoking, sometimes oddly juxtaposed. A group of often laterally connected objects would I hope offer a bit of a puzzle. I used to be fascinated by my grandfather’s weekly Italian puzzle magazine, La Settimana Enigmistica, which would feature a rebus – a visual puzzle I didn’t understand – that juxtaposed letters, symbols and part images. I have often thought about how an object-based rebus could allow a more open, thought -provoking exhibition experience and this show gave me that opportunity. I think we get closest to the idea of a rebus in the Discipline and Practice case in the glossary, which features a medieval book of hours, a pen set, Eadweard Muybridge’s photos of human movement, Jill Orr doing a performance where her body is suspended, a book on mantra and rosary beads. 

This may be a tough one, but do you have any favourite items from the Library’s collection that feature in the exhibition, if you could pick favourites?

Very hard! When you curate an exhibition, every object is your baby. I love of course our large-scale visual art commissions. Dr Deanne Gilson’s powerful paperbark heart is suspended in the middle of the gallery, its literal and spiritual heart. Behind this her beautiful creation story painting Bundjil and the Evening Star Spirits, flanked by Bundit Puangthong’s and Barry William Hale’s stunning mural-sized works. As far as small things go, a friend of mine had visited the gallery and loved seeing the abracadabra spell within John Aubrey’s Miscellanies, which curator Caroline Tully unearthed from the collection – he never thought abracadabra could have been real spell, as opposed to a joke spell from Disney cartoons and the like. Most of us don’t realise that abracadabra was a 2nd century spell. Here, it is written in a funnel shape to funnel disease away from the body. 

Can you talk about the soundscapes and video works that feature in Creative Acts?

The soundscape was curated by Byron J Scullin, a Melbourne electronica legend and composer himself, and features beautiful soundscapes by Naretha Williams, Sooji Kim, Mat Watson and Prudence Rees-Lee. We wanted to create a sort of sonic temple, and each artist has created a composition that speaks to creative process while also invoking the sort of state changes we are tracking in the exhibition. The soundscapes explore dreams, trance states, physical metamorphoses, communication with otherworldly beings, divine possession and healing.  

Creative Acts is open 10am-6pm daily until 31 May 2026.