In early 2019 artist duo Katie Parker and Guy Davis – also known as Future Retrieval – began an artists’ residency at the Lloyd Library. While looking in the catalog for books to use as inspiration, they noticed that descriptions of illustrated books often include the phrase “leaves of plates” preceded by a number. In the book world, a leaf is a piece of paper and a plate is an illustration printed separately from the text.

At the Lloyd, Future Retrieval researched the illustrations in books about botany, exploration, and alchemy, going down different paths as they narrowed their focus. In the studio they started to bring disparate ideas together, contextualizing them into a running compendium. After two months of surveying and documenting rare books they built a new environment by changing the context of the materials. They made the images their own and achieved the goal of visually representing the eclecticism found in their work as well as the Lloyd Library’s collections through objects, imagery and design. The result is a stunning mixed media immersive exhibition of ceramics, cut paper and textiles, featuring apothecary jars inspired by Lloyd collections.