Do this: Choose a book from your library; rewrite it to suit yourself. Be very detailed in some places and leave some pages blank. Write some poems; add your own illustrations, old photographs, things torn out of magazines, downloaded Wikipedia images, etc etc etc. When your book is full drop it in a neglected corner somewhere and leave it there for one year, ten years, 100 years … just as you like. But after some time has passed dig it up: it’s perfect.

About my work

I am fascinated by abandoned objects, things once loved, and well used, that got left outside, rained on & then thrown away. In a society that mass-produces so much stuff things once owned and discarded carry an extra charge. For the past several years I have been using discarded books as the basis for much of my work. I like to pick up discarded words & images too.

I have my own mythology about books. More than once as a child I visited houses where I found dark bookcases full of musty old hardbacks, with old-fashioned illustrations. I would pour over these mysterious, fascinating objects, trying to imagine the person who had first owned and read them. In my work I reenact the discovery of a dark, mysterious world within the pages of a familiar and comfortable old book.

I find the book form endlessly inspiring. I like to use words as images, and make drawings to be read along with the words. A book is a real working tool and its history as an object in the world is always present in any book-art-form. The book has been re-invented many times, and this encourages me to re-work the old structures and try out new ones.