Our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged. 

In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories. 

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

Stories are progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular.  Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. 

Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish

A Tasmanian Reading Room is an architecturally inspired installation that invites reflection about Tasmania and our relationship to it through engagement with its published fiction and non-fiction writing. Constructed as a miniature library, the work aims to create a space that evokes a sense of mystery and discovery, of encountering an ongoing narrative about the island that is in a continual state of becoming. You can browse through an ever-growing collection of books in which Tasmania is the protagonist, sit beneath a domed ceiling that features a hand-painted map of Tasmania or settle down with a book of your choice in an intimate reading nook.

Entering the reading room is a bit like going into a Tardis – the interior is completely different from the exterior. You first encounter a library of about 2,000 books, all of them with a Tasmanian connection. You then enter the central circular reading room which has a dramatic dome ceiling that features a hand-painted map of Tasmania and a round table with a quote from Richard Flanagan about the progression and circularity of words and stories along its perimeter. A globe illuminates the space like a moon.

But the heart of the Reading Room is an audio track that features the voices of 42 people reading from a book of their choice about Tasmania. The stories are diverse - an older man reads about the early history of Van Diemen’s Land, a child tells the story of a duck without feathers, a female describes the wildness of the sea… There are single and over-laid voices, the occasional cacophony and quieter moments that create space for reading and reflection. As the voices fade in and out it is difficult to pinpoint their exact source – it is as if they are embedded within the structure itself, as if the walls themselves are speaking.