15 Volume Reader
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.
Excerpt from 'Reflection to Paul: Excessive Acquisition,' a segment of Layla Tweedie-Cullen's forthcoming PhD exegesis titled Running Circles Around the Archive: Indexing, Digitising, Performing, Writing, Interweaving, Drifting Through, Publishing, and Conversing with the Paul Cullen Archive, expected to be submitted in May 2024.
"I’ve also amassed a substantial stack of photocopied and printed documents from various corners of the warehouse, reaching nearly a meter 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 for reading. But I changed my mind, recognising their research value, and instead, opted to bind them into 15 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. Each volume has 410 pages, tallied using a self-stamping numbering machine, the exact page count as the books in Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel found in your collection, now in Volume 12, #1854, p 4987. You know the story: a tale of an infinite library housed in identical hexagonal galleries, each containing 20 shelves, each shelf accommodating 32 standardised books, and each book featuring 40 lines per page with 80 letters per line. But despite this highly ordered and systematic arrangement, the library remains 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, just numbers, pages 1–5,740, with the archive catalogue numbers on the spines. No contents page – 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, jammed pages in the university printer, ripped, damaged, were lost in the process – an echo of my attempts to impose structure where it resists."