Olivia Chin – Circulation

Multidisciplinary artist Olivia Chin hosted a series of public art workshops where participants were able to collaborate on a large-scale artwork. The collection titled Circulation brings together a work from Olivia's exhibition Body Field, originally presented at Incinerator Gallery in early 2024, alongside three new works and a series of community-created cyanotypes developed in collaboration with local participants.

Participants used sunlight, plants and found forms from the local environment at Queens Park to fix their own impressions onto fabric using the cyanotype process. Each cyanotype was embroidered upon, participants adding their own marks, stitches, and gestures to the photographic surface.

The individual works were then sewn together by the artist into a single unified whole, now permanently held in the Quiet Study Space. The act of joining mirrors something essential about a library: that meaning accumulates through many individual contributions, and that separate things, brought into proximity, begin to speak to one another.

Installed on the library's second level, Circulation reflects a collaboration between more than 20 community members, Moonee Valley Libraries, and the Incinerator Gallery.