Window Gallery

In homage to the clay tablet origins of the printed word, Tessa Laird - a newcomer to the ceramic medium - has spent the last three years making clay copies of every book she has read. The desire to create facsimiles of inspiring tomes began while Laird was undertaking doctoral research at the Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland. Reading Room is the first public exhibition of this impossible bibliography in clay. An acknowledgement of artifice, her Clay tablets provide an interesting insight into the reading habits of a doctoral candidate. Mark Twain once stated, "In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them." While the books are humorous homages that are knowingly "useless", they simultaneously operate as exhortations to go and read the "real thing": their form frustrating the impulse to turn the page and read. Without a function, the books become fetishes, slyly mocking the collector's proclivity to hoard the book as an object without reading it, confirming Walter Benjamin's thesis in his famous essay "Unpacking my Library".