Rachel Smith

Promise the Infinite

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This project consists of ink drawings made in response to the first page of Jorge Luis Borges’ nine page story ‘The Library of Babel’. This imagined library consists of an infinite number of tessellating rooms, each with an identical number of shelves of unreadable books. These interconnected rooms generate a labyrinthine structure – a metaphor of the universe, with neither a centre nor an outside. 

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The concept of the work is to make a potentially infinite number of drawings. All are produced with ink on cartridge paper and are constrained by the form of the first page of Borges’ story (from my copy of the book).

 

As each book in the library of Babel is unreadable, so each drawing responds to a visual element of the page – many are completely abstract, some are tantalisingly close to being readable, and a number are only marginally different than other drawings.

 

Following the infinite number of books in Borges’ library, these drawings will continue to grow in number toward the infinite.

 

A large selection of the drawings have now been digitally scanned and collected together into an artist book which has now been published and can be purchased from Penteract Press 

 

However the drawings will continue to amass and develop towards the infinite (or a second edition at a later date)