Exhibition | Tina Pech: Bookish

On exhibition 1 March - 1 June 2025

Why do we like books? Is it just their content we admire, or their look and feel? What makes a book more than a literary object? These are the questions Baradine artist Tina Pech explores in her exhibition, Bookish.

Books historically have been valued as the keepers of knowledge. Books house both information and imagination: they contain our stories, records, secrets, and potentials for growth, insight, and change. While they remain silent communicators, their power is towering, inspiring us to read, absorb, inscribe, and to become story tellers in our own right.

Bookish features works that use traditional and invented construction methods, as well as alternative stitching and materials, to create a collection of book-like sculptures, mutations, and hybrids which push and challenge how we regard books and their functions. Bookish shows works that seek to extend a book’s structure and contents beyond the expected, as well as challenging our perception of books. Bookish shows books as structural vessels able to be deconstructed and reimagined, laying bare a book’s skeletal anatomy while displaying their layers and accentuating their content.

Tina Pech is a fibre textile artist whose creative practice is heavily influenced by the physicality of books, their tactility, warmth, and tangible presence. Through the practice of constructing and deconstructing books, she invites us to explore their physical structure, experimenting and playing with a book's boundaries and anatomy.

This is a HomeGround exhibition, produced by the WPCC and supported by Orana Arts. HomeGround is sponsored by Wingewarra Dental.

Image: Tina Pech, Book Blossom 1, 2024, altered book sculpture, gesso, acrylic paint. Image courtesy the artist.