Exhibitions Archive

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Student Installation

Installation by Ellie Jones, Studio 3 Elam School of Fine Arts June 2009

‘The word is not the thing, but the flash of light by which we perceive the thing’ – Diderot. Diderot’s statement doesn’t have to be so finite. There are ways in which I can change the nature of the relationship between ‘things’ and ‘words’. When looking art, the thing is the flash of light by which we perceive the text. There is potential for the word (signifier) and the object (signified) to change or merge roles. So many letters are stored in the library, but we don’t usually consider them as having physical properties – the page is an object but the words on them are two-dimensional signs. In this work, the page is used to create a letter which has observable physical properties- we can see the effects of environment, light, and gravity on them. This suggests that instead of arranging the letters in the library in a way that stores abstract information, there is potential for finding order based on the letters as individual entities.

Previous Exhibition

March 2009

Life before RSS feeds

Display photos

Library Bulletin was a tri-monthly publication issued by the Elam School of Fine Arts Library between 1965 - 1990. It contained a list of recent accessions, in subject order.

The content may have been dry and administrative but the packaging was not.

Elam’s students and faculty members were commissioned to produce cover images. Artists included Denys Watkins, John B. Turner, Jo Torr, Judy Millar and Paul Judge.

Previous Exhibition

Sept 2008

Unwearable | by Lisa Walker

Displayed is the limited edition book Unwearable, a survey of work (1992 - present) by local jeweller/artist Lisa Walker exhibited at Auckland's Objectspace in September , 2008. The book, when opened, is a stunning one metre wide and provides vivid images of the artist's works.

From the Objectspace summary:

"Unwearable is a provocation. It matters when a jeweller chooses such a confrontational title for an exhibition of work from the past four years. What's the angle here? What is Walker's game? If you are at all familiar with Walker's jewellery, you won't be surprised. The word ‘unwearable' does what all the best jewellery in this exhibition does when you consider putting it on - it is an aggressive challenge on a material, conceptual and sometimes even practical level that is consistently framed through jewellery history and the common denominator of wear, of function, that keeps jewellery ticking over."

Previous Exhibition

June 2008

Future Books (Installation)

The notion of having a book published about your work, for an artist or an academic, is sometimes regarded as one measure of success.
Future Books is a small collection of playful speculative texts.
Artists had been invited to create a placeholder for a potential future publication about their own practice, as a physical symbol of their own ambitions. The only prerequisite required of participants is that they had not yet 'achieved' a publication.

Curated and Published by Rory Dunleavy, Elam School of Fine Arts

Future books image 1

Future books image 2

Previous Exhibition

February 2008

1883-2008: Celebrating 125 Years

Library book bag designed by Yvonne Dai, Elam School of Fine Arts, for the University of Auckland 1883-2008 Jubilee period.

Yvonne has created a font using 'Lego' blocks to spell out '125' representing and signifying the collaborative nature of the University's growth.

Library book bags for sale $2.00 available throughout the library system.

Previous Exhibition

February 2007

A sample of pictorial and written reference material for courses in Art History Stage 1.

Books in the Cabinet Display

Diderot encyclopedia: the complete illustrations, 1762-1777. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1978.
Dorling Kindersley ultimate visual dictionary. London; New York: Dorling Kindersley, 1994.
Jones, Owen. The grammar of ornament. London: B. Quaritch, 1868
Wilkinson, Toby A. H. The Thames & Hudson dictionary of ancient Egypt. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.

Serial Title

Bulletin / Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ask at the Fine Arts Library front desk to view these books.

Previous Exhibition

June 2005

Artists' books are art objects in the form of books. They can challenge ways of seeing and understanding an idea, or ideas, through the use of an artist's images in these books. Words are not always present or essential in an artist's book.

The Whau River portage is an artist's book by Max White

Artist's book 04 -19
1 folded concertina style sheet [22] leaves: all coloured photographs. 2004.

‘The Whau River portage is the narrowest land connection between the

Waitemata and the Manukau habours…’

…it is the ‘industrial and urban edge of landscape’.

Ask at the Fine Arts library front desk to view this book.

Previous Exhibition

The Cloud of Unknowing is an artist's book by Megan Jenkinson

Artist's book 04 -23
1 v. (unpaged) all ill. ; 68cm. - a series of images in book form. 2004.

"My book, 'The Cloud of Unknowing', addresses the 'universal' with reference to current geographic trends and postcolonial thinking, accessed through late Victorian thought. To explore such concepts visually, landscape illustrations have been resequenced..."

Ask at the Fine Arts library front desk to view this book.

Previous Exhibition

March 2004

Beato of Liebana - Apocalypse and commentary

Beato of Leibana was a cultured monk who lived during the second half of the VIII century. Details about his life and work (in addition to that of his monks) have been found in the documents dating from the VIII and IX centuries that are kept in the Cartulary of Saint Toribio at Liebana. Due to his bible studies, Beato shared the common belief that the end of the world was nigh. The calculations made by the Holy Fathers and Beato confirmed that the year 800 was the anniversary of 6000 years after the first coming of Christ. The certainty of Beato about the imminent end of the world was such that, in his "Commentary on the Apocalypse" he announced the end of the sixth age to be exactly in the year 838.

This commentary was written to explain to the monks of that time the undecipherable passages in the Book of Revelations. For this reason it is literally a commentary of the text, in which Beato includes theological literature that had been previously written. Thanks to the meticulous work of Beato, many of his sources have been saved. Due to the length of the manuscript and its illumination, the "Commentary" of Beato is an outstanding piece of work of western culture.

This corpus is published with the assistance of the J. Paul Getty Trust, and includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Previous Exhibition

January 2004

Ground Work

Ground Work is a book hand-made by a group of artists: Alice Berryman, Ruth Green-Cole, Fleur Hufton, Jennifer Hyun, D Pitman, Nat Industries, Alexis Neal, Kate Stanton, Phil Trott.

Group Publication has produced 25 copies of Ground Work. Copies of the book are on display, opened at different places to show examples of the work of each artist.

Previous Exhibition

October 2002

Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Curiosities

Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Curiosities is one of the 18th century's greatest natural history achievements and remains one of the most prized natural history books of all time.

Though it was common for men of his profession to collect natural specimens for research purposes, Amsterdam-based pharmacist Albertus Seba (1665-1736) had a passion that led him far beyond the call of duty. His amazing, unprecedented collection of animals, plants and insects from all around the world gained international fame during his lifetime. In 1731, after decades of collecting, Seba commissioned illustrations of each and every specimen and arranged the publication of a four-volume catalog detailing his entire collection-from strange and exotic plants to snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, insects, butterflies and more, as well as fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon.
Seba's scenic illustrations, often mixing plants and animals in a single plate, were unusual even for the time. Many of the stranger and more peculiar creatures from Seba's collection, some of which are now extinct, were as curious to those in Seba's day as they are to us now.
This superb, complete reproduction is taken from a rare, hand-colored original. The introduction offers background information about the fascinating tradition of the cabinet of curiosities to which Seba's curiosities belonged and an additional annex, written by contemporary biologists, provides descriptions of the specimens.

The authors
Irmgard Müsch, born in 1967, studied art history, history and classical archaeology in Mainz and Berlin. Her Ph.D. thesis from 1999 examines Johann Jakob Scheuchzer's Kupfer-Bibel, a richly illustrated scientific commentary on the Bible from the early 18th century. She has published on art of the 18th and 20th century, scientific illustrations and Kunstkammer pieces.

Rainer Willmann, born in 1950, occupies the chair for morphology, taxonomy and evolutionary biology at the Institute for Zoology and Anthropology of the University of Göttingen. In some 120 publications he has addressed the phylogeny of insects, snail evolution, and historical and theoretical issues in biology. He is co-founder of the Research Centre for Biodiversity and Ecology at the University of Gottingen.