15 Volume Reader (410 pages each) containing photocopies and printouts compiled by Paul Cullen for research and teaching purposes, sourced from the artist’s studio. Conceptualised, bound, designed, and marbled by Layla Tweedie-Cullen (2022) as part of her PhD research Circles Within the Archive: Navigating the Paradoxes of Paul Cullen’s Practice. This PhD thesis will be available for access in early 2025.

Excerpt from 'Reflection to Paul: Excessive Acquisition,' a segment of Layla Tweedie-Cullen's forthcoming PhD exegesis Circles Within the Archive: Navigating the Paradoxes of Paul Cullen’s Practice.

"I’ve also amassed a substantial stack of photocopied and printed documents from various corners of the warehouse, reaching nearly a metre high, covering topics from art, science, and philosophy, to architecture, horticulture, and cosmology. Initially, I considered discarding them due to their dusty, musty condition, which made them uninviting to read. But I changed my mind, recognising their research value, and instead opted to bind them into fifteen hard-cover volumes in a traditional library style, A4 format trimmed down. They have gold-yellow buckram covers, similar in colour to the yellow pencils in your works. I’ve marbled the edges with swirling red, blue, yellow, and black inks, muddy in places, and tallied the pages using a self-stamping numbering machine: 1–5,740. Each volume has 410 pages, the exact page count as the books in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” found in your collection, now included in Volume 12 (page 4,987–4,996). You know the story: the infinite library housed in identical hexagonal galleries, each containing twenty shelves, each shelf accommodating thirty-two standardised books, and each book featuring forty lines per page with eighty letters per line. But despite this highly ordered and systematic arrangement, the library is incomprehensible. I draw parallels to my experience in this warehouse, where order and knowability seem perpetually out of reach. I’ve left the covers blank but have added page ranges, volume numbers, and archive catalogue numbers on the spines. There are no contents pages—each search becomes a journey through them all, a loop of rediscovery. It’s a labyrinth, these books that look like library volumes but aren’t quite. Inside, the structure breaks down. This recurring search inevitably leads to rediscovering other texts, a serendipitous, somewhat inefficient process. Page numbers skip, vanish, or barely appear—just a faint ink mark. Two volumes split A3 pages, read together, side by side. Pages missing, pages jammed in the university printer, ripped, damaged, were lost in the process—an echo of my attempts to impose structure where it resists."