Books presents works in which reading becomes a performative act. These projects treat the book not only as a container for text, but as a spatial, emotional and temporal structure that can be entered, interpreted and performed.
The works combine narrative, image, gesture and atmosphere. They ask how a book can become a landscape, a score, a memory device or a place where imagination turns into shared experience.
TWO GARDENS (2011–2015)
A love story that almost makes sense
Two Gardens is an unfinished story, or a story deliberately left open. It is a love story about memory, hesitation and the emotional landscapes people construct when feelings remain unspoken.
The work follows the imaginary gardens of Ms Smile, whose descriptions become so vivid and frequent that they begin to feel real to the people around her. In Smileville, a small fictional town governed by Mayor Peter Flowers, the gardens exist somewhere between language, memory and desire.
The story is shaped by the hidden wishes of two people: one waiting for the other, and one too shy to act. Their emotional world appears through a series of landscape paintings by Leonard Bullock, in which imagined gardens become visual extensions of longing, delay and affection.
Two Gardens treats love as something that begins in the imagination before it can enter reality. The garden becomes a metaphor for what is cultivated inwardly, shared through speech and finally allowed to bloom.
THIS IS SOMETHING FOR ME
A performative book as an emotional landscape
This Is Something For Me is a performative book that is read as one might play a piece of music. The reader becomes a performer, and each reading becomes an interpretation.
The book includes instructions for how it should be approached: remain attentive to the present moment, stay calm and silent, feel the turning of each page as a movement of the body, and experience changes in colour as changes of light within the room.
Through this process, the book becomes less a fixed text than an emotional landscape. Its pages are read through time, gesture, atmosphere and bodily attention.
The work proposes that we are connected to the landscapes we inhabit and carry within ourselves. Weather, sleep, waking, earthquakes and eruptions become metaphors for emotional states and for the fragile ties between people and place.