Shoal Arts
cooperative
SINCE 2015
Artist: Claire Johns
Title: Untitled
Medium: beech leaves and Haynes car manuals
I love books. I love reading books, I love making books, I love all sorts of books, so I make artist books. You can’t often read these books and although they have all the components of a book, a spine, a binding and sections they become more than their contents. They become a book which is not a book.
For the sensible ‘arty’ bit, the books are constructed from beech leaves and the sections composed of Haynes car manuals. I was looking at the impact of the environment by not just the car but by the changing behaviour of human habitat.
The leaves were collected from the back of my garden which has a piece of protected land known as a saxon bank. This saxon bank runs the length of a housing estate, surrounded by houses on both sides, in the front of many houses the gardens have been paved over to make room for more off street parking. I am not saying people should not have cars or trying to make any statements about climate change or environmental disasters but to point out that this bank has stood and will continue to stand in spite of the behaviour of generations of human impact. Every spring as I pull up onto my drive I can see the beech hedge coming back to life.
The covers on these books are now dying and will continue to decay but so will the paper eventually and so will cars, housing and maybe human life and then nature will take over once again.