Reader in an Armchair

The sculpture came about as the third version of The Reader, originally intended for the front of a public library building. Paradoxically it was made at a time when the commission had long since fallen through and no library showed any interest in it. But by then I had gradually become very taken with the problem of a sculpture of a person absorbed in the world unfolding in a book. In The Reader I wanted to show both the person reading and the imaginative world of the book. I used an armchair to do it. The armchair is a soft, soothing rampart that shields us from the pragmatic world around us and lets us escape into a world of imagination and fantasy. It is a dream armchair, and the reader in it is deliberately an anonymous, symbolic figure, easily exchangeable for any reader at all. At the same time the armchair lends the sculpture monumentality and strengthens the meaning and importance of so fragile a subject. And not least, it is right to pay tribute to the world of the paper book at a time when it — and we with it! — is under threat from the aggressive world of information technology and castrated e-books.