Jayne Dyer

Language has a complex relation to the private. It can be gesture as much as representation, capturing a compendium of thoughts and ideas while at the same time operating kinetically C as a vehicle for their circulation. It errs to standards but can be dramatically idiosyncratic. Or at least, it functions within a rubric of particular experience and individual selectiveness. And sometimes, what language conceals has a disproportionate relationship to that which it reveals.
In Stutter text is erased, disguised, superimposed, folded and stitched; at times snapped shut to prevent consumption, at others enticingly present visually and interpretatively. Jayne Dyer simultaneously speculates on the narratives contained and constructs new ones, where content is subsidiary and intuited, out of reach and readability, and resituated in such a way that fact and fiction might be related, or trivia and tome could carry the same weight. Through intervention, textual and textural constituencies are given arbitrary values.
More broadly though, it is our investment in language that is at stake. By considering the objectness of words, the architecture of books, the mutability of text and even its desecration, Dyer dismantles the presumption that the written word is sacrosanct and asserts an aesthetic and rhythmic accountability. She manages to find within the disruptive, repetitive burst of the stutter something of its protean and poetic phonetic opposite: a certain eloquence, here residing clearly, and appositely, in the locale of displacement.
Lesley Harding, 2006
Curator, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Excerpt from Stutter catalogue
Uber Gallery, Melbourne

The concept of displaying unreadable text in the Lingnan University Library intrigued me for several reasons. Books have a duality: information comes from both the content and the format. When the content has been hidden and the format destroyed, you must then rethink the very nature of a book. Also intriguing is the idea of a library housing text that could not be read and text that had been shredded as it calls attention to the Librarys mission to make text accessible and to preserve it for the future.
Libraries have many black books: we all face a similar problem when were confronted with a book in a language that we cannot penetrate or in a location that we can not access. The works become real or virtual ciphers, hiding their meaning within the blackness of their characters or tantalizing us with only a citation in a bibliography. And besides the black books, libraries are getting an increasing number of invisible ones. The meaning carried by the format and physicality of the book, the visual guidelines provided by the sight of a thirty-volume set on a reference shelf have vanished in the digital world. An entire shelf is now reduced to a mouse click, an entire library is now concealed behind the white blank of a search box.
Readers see a book as an object that contains words, information and inspiration, ideas and stories. I find myself looking behind the blackness of Jayne Dyers books for the meaning they must contain, have to contain, or why else would they be a book? The project stimulated the staff and student cohort to question what a book is, what text and words mean to them, and what access and absence mean to their lives.

Frederick Nesta,
Lingnan University Librarian
Words for Pictures catalogue essay
Artist in residence project, Lingnan University,? March C May 2007

Essay 3
The significance of the site as central to a particular knowledge of the colony is the focus of Jayne Dyers installation.
A library is a repository of accumulated facts, hypotheses and conjecture. For Dyer, the library presents a strange disjuncture. When built in 1839, it was the largest room in the house. Stripped bare of its 4000 volumes (in 1845), it is a shell of Alexander Macleays obsession with literature and natural history. Dyer uses the books as structures rather than as objects or compilations of text. The books partially blocking the view to the drawing room and the bay infer that their contents may also be restrictive. The collection of books is also symbolic of the house because it represents the transportation of a system of knowledge to the colony, held in a single house that is now a public institution. The house is the site of encyclopaedic ordering of the colony. Dyers books appear as homage, yet undefinable, their spines blackened to conceal the titles, also providing a funereal reference to lost or forgotten books.
What remains of Alexanders collection of butterflies and moths is secured in specially fitted cabinets originally owned by Macleay and on loan to Elizabeth Bay House from the Macleay Museum. Dyer is curious about the only closed door in the library. In 1841 the scientist J D Hooker, visiting the house noticed the distinct smell of camphor and specimens emanating from the preparation room. The doorway to this room, slightly ajar, reveals a later brick wall blocking its entrance. Butterflies escape en masse through the opening from the former preparation room. They swarm, attaching themselves to furniture and the floor, appearing as a menacing presence in the room.
Like many artists, Dyer is also a collector. She has collected books published between 1835 and 2007, selecting titles that reflect the different uses of the house. Upstairs, unlike the nameless books downstairs, her constructions operate as an open-ended linguistic production C in a state of flux, literally spilling out of the doorway, pointing towards an understanding of a narrative, but recognising that responses are momentary and individual.

Jennifer Barrett, Director, Museum Studies, University of Sydney
Scott Carlin, Curator, Historic Houses Trust
Excerpt Spare Room catalogue, 2007
The exhibition was one in a series at the Elizabeth Bay House Museum