Nicola Dale

Kindle
v. light (a flame), set on fire
v. arouse (with reference to an emotion)
n. portable e-reader

The format of knowledge is changing. Although it can still be found on paper and in books, knowledge is increasingly located in circuit boards and light. Kindle visualises the losses inherent in this transition. The installation takes the form of thousands of hand-made “candles”, made using unwanted books.

The work is inspired by Umberto Eco’s novel “The Name of the Rose”, in which a mysterious labyrinthine library, full of precious editions and rare manuscripts, is razed to the ground. The main character returns to rescue what fragments remain:

"I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books."

Presented alongside each of the 26 groups of candles is an object. Each object has been made from the leftover book covers and represents a word that has fallen out of common English usage… The objects point to the fate of books themselves: neither words, nor their containers, last forever.

Kindle was created with funding from Arts Council England, in partnership with John Rylands Library, Deansgate (The University of Manchester) and Untitled Gallery, Manchester.