Mickey Smith’s Morphologies at The Arts House Trust traces the history of the library back to Alexandria, where it was never primarily a repository but a platform: for conversation, philosophy, debate. A place communities used however they needed.

One of the starting points for the exhibition is the Hereford Cathedral chained library, a repository of 1,100 books dating from the 8th to the 19th century, each chained by its fore-edge to the shelf. The chain slides along a rod; the book can be pulled down, opened and read whilst staying in situ. 

The work sits inside that longer arc, asking what libraries are becoming as much as what they have been. Smith’s position is clear: they are living cultural institutions, not archives. The chain, in this reading, is less a restraint than a record — of how knowledge has always been held in tension between access and control.