Introducing the Library of Ideas

7 June 2013

What small items do you treasure? The Library of Ideas - an installation devised by artists Eleanor Davis & Deborah Aguirre-Jones has recently been unveiled at Junction 3, a new development for Easton in Bristol which includes a Library and Learning Centre.  Local residents, construction workers and visitors were asked to donate objects of personal significance.  The result is an everyday but extraordinary collection that forms a portrait of the rich community surrounding Junction 3.  

Davis & Jones were commissioned to lead a public engagement project throughout the development.  The Library of Ideas was part of this programme and Davis & Jones collaborated with Gitta Geschwendtner to realise the installation. The writer and independent researcher, Francois Matarosso, who has a long career in community-based arts and cultural practice, contributed an introduction to the accompanying publication in which he writes : “The Library of Ideas shows us that it is not only the rare and expensive things that matter.  Our humbler, everyday treasures are just as important to each of us. […] It’s not the container that is important, it is the contained. The heart may be, as Yeats called it, a rag and bone shop, but it is the heart that matters.”

The Library of Ideas publication is available for sale through the Arnolfini, the Junction 3 library and through Willis Newson - email us. It costs £3 plus postage and packing and contains images and stories related to all the donated objects. 

The Junction 3 public engagement programme, out of which this work came, was managed by Willis Newson for Bristol City Council. The installation itself is free to view in the lobby of the new Library at Junction 3 

Photography by Max McClure.