Redfern 1988        Artist's Statemement                                  

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 Library Steps

This exhibition focused on the library and the thoughts I was beginning to have about human consciousness seeking knowledge and self-improvement.

Having taught for most of my life, at all levels from 11 upwards, I found my brain filled with thoughts about ideas and issues that often had no real interest for me but were a necessary part of my concern and responsibility to help others move in the direction that they perceived they were interested in.

Obviously I am not the fount of all knowledge so I often found myself seeing, hearing or reading things that might be of some use to either 'Mary, John or Josephine': individuals amongst the student body. I found this amusing and fulfilling in many ways but it tended to put my own interests on the back burner and create some confusion for me: trying to hang on to my own position in the world. Hence the library is a significant subject: central to the feelings I was beginning to have about the absurdity of human consciousness.

The library steps were, for me, a metaphor for this absurdity in that they are an ingenious human contraption designed to reach the utmost limits of the knowledge in the library: that is, if you know what you are looking for and where to look.

I felt there was an element of poetry in the Library steps that I had in mind as they also collapse to function as a seat for the perplexed.

Of course the advent of Google and the accessibility of the Internet has taken the sting out of research now, but it also might lead to a rather superficial attitude to the subject of knowledge as something easily acquired.