Australia

Australia was made as part of the project The Library of Lost Books based at the Library of Birmingham and was included in the exhibition celebrating the opening of the new library in 2013.

Artists were asked to make work with, or in response to, books which were being discarded but still had much to offer.

Each artist was sent a book at random and Hyslop received a copy of the Catalogue for the Melbourne Public Library of 1861. This list of volumes offered up numerous options and Hyslop focussed upon the botanical illustrations of Australian plants that adorned the beginning of each alphabetical section. She identified the plants and chose nine of the twenty six plants, one for each letter to spell Australia. Her book maintains the exact size of the original and uses the rich ochre colour of the end paper as her cover but she brought the plants back to life from their tightly drawn forms printed in black by re-drawing them and printing them in a range of greens. The pages are folded at the fore-edge of the book to enable it to be peppered with green, as opposed to the original red, again to underline the notions of re-birth and growth.