A Mobile Library

26 November 2011 - 12 February 2012 in the Hirschfeld Gallery

Public space, carefully lit, where people go to look, to read, to be alone. To think thoughts too large for bedrooms and houses. To kill time before eating cake and digesting it later, to take shelter from the weather, to return and look again. Public galleries and libraries have a lot in common. In City Gallery the relationship is a more literal one: the Gallery’s current building originally housed the Wellington Public Library, until 1991.[1] A Mobile Library recalls this history, adopting the function of a library while considering ways that publications, print media of all kinds, and the act of reading relate to contemporary art production.

This exhibition offers three different experiences of text: typographic design by Joseph Churchward and Kris Sowersby (in collaboration with graphic designer Duncan Forbes from The International Office); a reference library of loaned artists’ books and small press publications; a curated selection from graphic designer (and co-editor of The National Grid) Luke Wood’s library. Publications are essential to the way contemporary art is documented, circulated, promoted, and received. This exhibition suggests they represent a vital interface for contemporary art’s audience, and for its makers.

The library presented here is primarily sourced from individual’s collections. A widely circulated call requested the short term loan of publications (by or about artists and designers and produced, authored by, or focused on New Zealand makers) from the last six years. The resulting compilation includes contributions from a vast range of libraries, mobilised for an exhibition offering a cross-section of what this self-defining community of believers-in-print are reading, writing and making.

Design is fundamental to the narrative about publication and print. Here the relationship is explored in the publications themselves, in a series of posters by Sowersby and Forbes, and in samples of Churchward’s type design on the gallery’s end wall. The buoyancy and expressive punch of Churchward’s alphabets earned him international standing from the late 1960s, when he founded what became New Zealand’s largest typesetting firm, Churchward International Typefaces. Three typefaces—Churchward Brush, Churchward Design and Churchward Conserif—articulate statements from a prolific designer whose work continues to engage a wide audience of contemporary designers.

Sowersby and Forbes’ posters feature the ISBN and publishing information of design-related books instrumental within their respective practices. Eloquently re-presenting the coded and technical detail relating to a book’s production, cataloguing and distribution, these works intimate the role of design in crafting every element of a text, while suggesting an alternative categorisation of the book, as physical object, or unit of archived data.

The design of a space and its furniture plays no small part in our experience of reading and of the room. Candywhistle designer Holly Beal’s Gallons table, Print-rung bench seat and reading desks acknowledge and respond to the singular ways people like to read and occupy communal space. Temporarily encamped in a gallery, this library exists to be useful; please take time to handle the publications, to consider the architecture of letter forms, and to read.  

[1] In 1993 the City Gallery moved into the former Wellington Public Library building. The Library moved to its current premises, adjacent to the old site.

New Zealand Web Archive

Further reading

A Mobile Library essay
A catalogue of links
A bookplate commission

Media release

A Mobile Library