Re-Reading the Library

About

Re-reading the library is a project for Art Licks Weekend 2019, exploring ways the Women Artists of the North East Library can be read and re-read, to consider the library a space to acknowledge an inevitable dependency on other artists’ practices, on their interventions, their struggles and also their accomplishments.

The Women Artists of the North Library will be in residence at the Freelands Foundation reading room, where you’re invited to browse the library, photocopy it and record your own readings of the literature, which will be added to a bank of audio recordings on a Women Artists of the North East Library SoundCloud account. In the space will also be work by artists Katy Bentham, Tess Denman-Cleaver, Emily Hesse, Fiona Larkin, Nellie Saunby and Holly Argent, as part of an on-going project exploring how various narratives may be constructed from the Women Artists of the North East library material and what this might sound like.

Considering the library as a loose coagulates of related projects, it holds multiple narratives from across times and spaces. Taking the exercise of reading as a starting point, the library will be read in various ways over the weekend registering and sharing aloud the voices and lineages, both regional and further spreading, that currently form the library’s trajectory.

Re-reading the library is also an opportunity to consider how, if we propose ourselves as a ‘readership’, we are reliant upon already established readings of historical narratives or more anecdotal (local) experiences, and what combinations of these might displace one another.

Women Artists of the North East Library is an artist-led project that brings together donated material, including: research, books, audio and images to form a usable resource that contributes to the history of women artists (including women-identifying, non-gender binary, trans women) working in the region. Initiated in 2017 with the help of The Northern Charter Graduate Bursary, the project now exists as a collection of donated material and a rolling programme of events centring on the archive and artists that make up the library.