INSIGHT ‘‘ F
There’s something about the physical nature of the faded book that holds a record of its life, and for information professionals there is an intuitive object awareness that is guided by the library’s stock assessment framework. – Chris Carmody
Barbara Lemon is a curator, historian and library professional who specialises in oral history and digital collections for national libraries. See more at
www.lemonbell.press
OR many in the
information profession, even those of us who work entirely with digital collections, there remains
a deep reverence for the book as object. It might be the quality of the paper, the binding, the smell, the weight, that cracking sound as pages long closed are opened anew. It might be the title, the cover image, the font.
The material qualities of books and bookends are the focus of a long-running series of paintings by Australian artist Chris Carmody, who has worked as a library assistant for two decades. By examining and replicating the chromatic fade on book covers found during his working hours, he recreates the “subtle record of storage and use” that builds over the life of the object. It’s a process he describes himself as “focussed and reiterative”. Not unlike librarianship. For Carmody, this is more than an ode to the ageing monograph. “The book drops away. The layers I’m pulling into the painting are lifted out and the sentimental sense of ‘this is an old book, therefore it’s valuable’, is altered. I use a very methodical, disinterested and bureaucratic process, I have a spreadsheet. However, while there’s this distancing that eschews sentiment, there’s still something nostalgic going on.” Carmody graduated from Canberra School of Art in 2009 and received the Qantas Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award in 2012. This generous endowment allowed him to travel throughout the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia over many months to document faded library books. On return, he and partner Hannah moved to the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, shifting jobs from university to public libraries and
August-September 2026
then heading further west to live and work in Yuendumu and Nyirripi on Warlpiri Country in the Northern Territory of Australia, working for Warlukurlangu Artists Inc. Carmody and family now reside in Brisbane/Meanjin.
Libraries
The connection with libraries dates back to a casual job as the shelver in a university library. “I’d already realised I needed to be an artist, which meant I needed to have another job. Then I found myself performing this incredibly satisfying work in which the books are not the object of studious attention but rather they are objects in a system, and my attention shifted to a broad observation of what else might be occurring in the library environment.
“The first time I remember picking up a book that was faded, taking it to the loans desk and showing it to the librarians, these worlds collided seeing how quickly they assessed the book through their sense of responsibility to the collection. There’s something about the physical nature of the faded book that holds a record of its life, and for information professionals there is an intuitive object awareness that is guided by the library’s stock assessment framework. For me, this divergence of opinion put my observations in stark contrast because I knew the fading was an abstraction of the system.”
Layers
Carmody’s paintings are “essentially layers of interrelated information: colour, edge, shape, design, texture, text, tape, labels, ridges and corrugations, reflection, shadow, wear and tension.” The layers of paint present this information in a way that is suspended for consideration.
Occasionally the text or subject matter of a book finds its way into a painting, sometimes directly as in the 2025 work ‘Reading Room’, sometimes conceptually, and always in the title of the work, which takes on each book’s library call number. “One time shelving in the ND699’s I noticed that the adhesive cover label was peeling off one of these stout dark blue- grey books, these xerographic microfiche editions made in the 1980s. I was staring at this encrusted dark rectangle on the cover and I looked inside to check the title, and it was Kasimir Malevich’s black square and the genesis of suprematism, 1907-1915. Well I can’t not paint that, right?”
Crossover
Ultimately, Carmody’s decades-long preoccupation is with the crossover between human and natural systems. “While nostalgia could be said to transport us through time, I find myself wondering what is outside of time? The faded book holds a tale of adjacency. Perhaps by fixing a relation between the painting and an object in space and time we are inevitably drawn into the nostalgia of dislocation, call it being in two places at once, longing for both. Perhaps that is the origin of the emotion in these paintings.” IP
l For more on Chris Carmody’s work see
www.chriscarmody.com and
www.civicartbureau.com.
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 15
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