Literacy/ESL/World Languages (LEW) Floor
Artist
Ann Hamilton
MediumMaple, tongue and groove floor boards, pre-finished
Dimensions7,200 sq ft
ClassificationsIntegrated Art
Credit LineLibraries for All Bond 1% for Art funds
Description: The wood floor consists of 556 lines of maple floorboard routed to make a walkable surface of relief letter forms. Like a bed of moveable metal or wood type laid in preparation for printing, the letter forms in the floor are inverted. While this inversion makes an overt reference to a historical printing technique, its orientation, which creates the experience of reading backwards, also demonstrates the experience of learning to read as a process wherein abstract symbols become, in time, transparent and meaningful words and sentences. As a continuous tactile field, the floor of text contains running lines from the 11 languages which currently form the largest and most frequently used areas of the LEW Collection: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese. These lines are a collection of 1,543 first sentences gathered by patrons and librarians from books in The Seattle Public Library Fiction and LEW collection. Fiction and Non-fiction, poetry and musical lyrics are the dominant textual sources. First lines may not be the most notable line of a book but after the cover they are a universal portal to an immersion in a book’s interior world. Thus the floor as an oceanic physical surround amplifies the immersive experience of reading a page to become an architectural field for the ongoing experience and activities of the library patron.
Location: Central Library, 1000 Fourth Avenue, Seattle WA 98104
Location: Central Library, 1000 Fourth Avenue, Seattle WA 98104
Isabel Sim-Hamilton
