In 2016 Abigail Reynolds, the only South West artist to be featured in The British Arts Show 9, undertook a five-month journey, partially by motorbike, to 15 sites of former great libraries along the Silk Road.

Beginning in China, she travelled through Uzbekistan, Turkey, Egypt, Italy and Iran to places where libraries have been lost to political conflict, natural catastrophe, revolution and war.

In this way she encountered losses across the longest global route and over a huge span of time, from 291 BCE to 2011. Along the way, she recorded her impressions as well as the histories of these sites in writing for her book Lost Libraries, published in 2017 by Hatje Cantz.

Her art piece When Words are Forgotten, displayed as part of The British Art Show 9 at The Levinsky Gallery, was inspired by this journey and in response to the experience of visiting these sites where knowledge and culture have been voided and imagining how their vanished libraries looked and what they contained.

The 'library of glass' is a potent mix of transparency and opacity, reflecting 'the power of books to colour and distort our perceptions and also the fragility of books and the structures of knowledge that they represent'.

Here she tells her story - and why she has such a passion for libraries in the first place.

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