Five Foot Shelf was the first presentation of a recurring project developed by Fiona Jardine as a consequence of her involvement in How to Turn the World by Hand and a subsequent period of stay in Beijing. Five Foot Shelf takes its title from a prize winning bibliography - a five foot shelf - produced by W. Reginald Wheeler in 1917. Wheeler's bibliography was intended as an "authoritative list of books which might serve as a foundation for a library dealing with all phases of Chinese life, art, trade, finance, customs, politics, international relations and history". Five Foot Shelf aimed to generate comparisons between the processes of knowledge and trade, playing with notions of visibility, reliability and legality: circuits of production, encoding and storage.

Fiona Jardine was born in Galashiels and lives in Glasgow. She gained a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee in 1998 and a MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2003. She is currently pursuing PhD research into “signature” at the University of Wolverhampton. In 2011, she curated Troglodytes for the Contemporary Art Society from the painting and studio pottery collection at Paisley Museum. Group exhibitions include: Transmission, Glasgow; Centre d’art Mira Phalaina / Maison Poulaire, Montreuil, France; Tramway, Glasgow; and The Changing Room, Stirling. Solo shows include: Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow; and the ICA, London.

Read the How to Turn the World by Hand publication here

How to Turn the World by Hand was a year-long international research project between Collective, Edinburgh, PiST///, Istanbul and Arrow Factory, Beijing. It involved a three phase project including an exhibition exchange, events and a discussion programme investigating trade. How to Turn the World by Hand also included exhibitions by Fiona Jardine, Sun Xun and James N Hutchinson at Collective.