25 Aug Something Unknown
Short essay by Bradley Vincent
Curator & Writer 2025
I remember fondly my childhood visits to the old Nerang Public Library. As my mother picked up her reading for the week, a vital escape no doubt from three children and the toils of working-class life, I wandered the children’s shelves in search of something unknown. While the school library up the road was every day, compulsory seeming, the public library was more sprawling to little me, more mysterious, and more full of the potential of discovery. I wonder now what impact it had on me and my pathway.
Though there were fallow teenage years, shunning books in favour of other pursuits, I would sure enough return, drawn back into the stacks. Though the scale would change as university libraries overwhelmed and State libraries awed, the local library, that hub of service embedded in its suburban community, holds a particular place. They are both steadfast and evolving. Models of public amenities that increasingly feel like last stands against siloing, separating populations. We must be thankful for their persistence.
Gold Coast libraries form a network of civic nodes, each serving a distinct community while remaining connected to the wider, growing fabric of the city. They are the anchor points of a web, spreading across the coastal strip and hinterland, functioning not only as repositories of knowledge but also as connective points of information, services, and social exchange. From these nodes, information, and now art, spreads outward, permeating the streets and cul-de-sacs of neighbourhoods, the houses and units, the sitting rooms and bedrooms, within them. The Book Plate Art Project is an exciting new initiative, led by Leanne McIntyre, that introduces contemporary art into this equation in the most surprising way.
Thanks to the Book Plate Art Project, lucky, unsuspecting library members will find themselves taking home an original, postcard-sized artwork created by some of the city’s most well-regarded artists. Distributed throughout the different library branches, hidden within books, the artworks of the six artists chosen for the Gold Coast edition of this project await discovery. Those artists are Hiromi Tango, Robyn Sweaney, Norton Fredericks, Trent Mitchell, Beth Thompson, and Ju Ferreira. Right now, the results lie in wait, art cradled by the potential that’s held in any book awaiting its reader. What this project taps into is that art is made exactly for that moment of connection, of discovery and subsequent contemplation. While this is typically mediated through museums or art galleries, here it is given a new context, one of civic services that recognises both the practical and the intangible value in knowledge sharing. The project is also an act of generosity. Those fortunate enough to find an artwork can keep it, a reminder of that moment and all that it is connected to, and potentially a trigger for continued, lifelong engagement with our libraries and civic life more broadly.
The Book Plate Art Project unlocks the potential in ‘the unknown unknown’. It understands the impact of ‘the thing that you didn’t know that you needed’. In this way, it’s not only about inserting art into daily life, but about reinforcing what libraries have always stood for: the quiet thrill of discovery, the possibility of chance encounters, and the circulation of ideas that ripple outward into community life. By embedding contemporary artworks within the very mechanisms of knowledge exchange, the project reframes the library as both archive and information hub, and as gallery, a place where the unexpected can take root. On the Gold Coast, a city often defined by its transience and spectacle, these hidden artworks offer a reminder of the slower, more intimate ways we can come together through curiosity, through sharing, and through the sustaining presence of our public institutions, which here resist the pull of commercialisation to instead nurture connection, belonging, and cultural depth.
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