State Library Unveils ‘Paper Universe’ Flipping the Script on Rare Books
The State Library of NSW wants you to put your books down (just for a while) and explore a collection made for more than reading. Its new exhibition showcases books you can’t just crack open, but unfold, sculpt, or even walk around.
Opening 11 August, Paper Universe: The book as art pulls nearly 100 rarely seen works from the Library’s underground vaults and into the spotlight. In an age when screens dominate and the printed page is under siege, this show proves the book is far from done.
“Artists’ books break all the rules” at the State Library
Paper Universe features creations from some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, though you won’t find them in your local Dymocks’.
But don’t expect to cringe at dog-eared novels. These volumes stretch, twist and transform—collaged, carved and painted. While some might fit in your palm, others sprawl across 40 metres of gallery floor.
“Artists’ books break all the rules,” says curator Maria Savvidis, who has spent years trawling through more than 700 works in the collection. “They’re not just something to read, they’re something to experience.”
Curating decades of ‘books as art’
The State Library only began collecting artists’ books in the ’90s, but the medium has been quietly upending expectations since the 1960s.
Savvidis has pulled together heavy-hitters from those early days, like Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), an accordion-fold photo series that mapped LA’s most famous street decades before the existence of Google Street View.
What makes Paper Universe stand out is its unpredictability, and the unique chance to size up a book for everything but its words, all under one roof.
Stories spill off the page in Paper Universe
Experience There’s David Frazer’s brooding take on Nick Cave’s Love Letter, where 18 tiny wood engravings tell the story of “hopeless men dreaming of the time they once had a girlfriend, but blew it.”
And yes, you can listen to the song as you look.
Take in Liz Powell’s ochre-painted landscape, bound with sticks she collected in the Northern Territory, stretching out like a desert horizon.
From stitching the past to crafting the present at NSW State Library
Meanwhile, Penny Evans’ Proof 2015—a hand-sewn, cloth-bound tapestry of digital prints and loose threads piecing together her Gamilaroi, Welsh, Irish and German heritage, confronting Australia’s history before and after invasion.
The works embrace the messy, political, sentimental or absurd, often all at once, according to Savvidis, responding to music, poetry, nature, identity and the occasional heartbreak.
For those itching to get hands-on, there’s a dedicated maker’s space where you can create your very own paper art.
Workshops and artist talks will run alongside the free exhibition, so attendees can hear directly from the people bending the definition of “book” into something unrecognisable.
State Librarian Dr. Caroline Butler-Bowdon hopes it’s the start of something for visitors. “We want people to walk out inspired to start their own creative project,” she says.
And while you’ll probably leave inspired, seeing your bookshelf a little differently, maybe hold off on testing it on any first editions.
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