Ten-thousand paper planes

Ross Coulter is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice explores conceptual and material notions of levity and gravity. As the 2010-2011 Georges Mora Fellow he undertook a project that involved the release of 10,000 paper planes in the domed reading room.

In the late ‘90s I was working in the photocopy section of the Library and the domed reading room was being renovated. I was observing people photocopying books and maps and objects and thinking about the information that people might keep and what they might discard, what they might value and what was sort of useless. During my tea break I grabbed a discarded photocopy out of the waste paper bin in the copy centre, folded up a paper plane and went into the domed Reading Room to the third floor.

I was also thinking about email and the internet, the way information might move through space and about the future and the value of books and knowledge and how that might be challenged in time. And I launched this discarded photocopy into the dome.

Then one Friday afternoon after a film class in 2004 I thought, ‘What would be good would be to launch a thousand paper planes into the dome, to make a video work of this launch of a thousand planes’, extending upon this idea of information moving through space, these paper planes articulating ideas that might move through space. The launch of the paper planes is a rebellious act as well;

I like tying creativity with this sort of rebellious and anti-establishment act.

If you’re sitting in the domed reading room and you’re reading something, the ideas sort of wafting up into the space… that space is being articulated or described through the release of these paper planes carving through the air. So the paper planes are like representations of thoughts or ideas. The domed reading room could be imagined as being like a cranium and that these paper planes were articulating the notion of a thought that might move through space, when something moves into a space it describes it and gives it volume.

You can’t take a book home but you can access it here in this space, and there’s space for you to reflect and read and think about the ideas you might be engaging with, or to lose yourself in the story of the book. I couldn’t believe how fortunate I was to receive the fellowship and then receive access to the library, the thinking space. It’s quite a wondrous space although not everyone knows about it. It’s like an open secret, that’s the unusual thing.

And more than 10,000 paper planes are stored downstairs in the catacombs.