If you look closely in the last post of me sanding down the cabinet you can see a book on the top shelf. This post is going to explain the meaning behind why I reshaped the book, the way I did. The book itself is representing the idea of my heart bleeding from having to read books when I was younger. I would try to read a bit in my spare time, mainly because I wanted to understand the fascination that people around me had with reading. I never really got it because I found myself struggling with the books too much and I would normally get frustrated with it all. I would get depressed with the idea that I was only few pages in and other people had finished the book and would be talking about it in class. Inevitably I would hear a spoiler and it ruined the whole book for me.
When I was collecting this book I found that I had a stronger connection to this particular one, more than the others. The reason for this is because it looked like one of the books that I would have liked to have the patience to read when I was younger. It was a thick book with a red cover concealed in a dust jacket with an interesting image on it. I must say when I saw this book on the shelf there was just something about it that I felt myself being pulled towards it. It was calling out to me like a forbidden fruit; books like this always have.
When I was younger I remember going shopping with my parents before we went on holiday, this was somewhat of a tradition as they are keen readers. They would always get a book or three for the holiday, they would drag me around Waterstones or WHSmiths, looking for a few books for the trip. They would always encourage me to get one. I would slope around the shop looking at comics and the funny birthday cards more than the books. With the constant call every so often from one of them asking me if I had found a book yet. I would always find a comic with a few brain teasers. But they would soon drag me back down the shop to the books and encourage me to get one of these. I found myself wanting the big heavy hard back as I had an active imagination and I liked the front cover. I knew in my heart that I’d never read it, so did my parents who also knew they would be the ones lugging it about. They soon put that back and picked up a small book with like a 100 pages and tell me that would do.
So when I found this book and there was no one there to tell me to put it back. I knew I had to have it. It was perfect. I Knew what I had to do with it the moment I saw it, after all the memories came flooding back it made me want it even more.
When I went into the studio, I took the book straight down to the woodwork room (well right after my morning coffee) and started work drilling out the center of the book with a large circle hole cutter and after putting pressure on it for a moment or so it cut through the book, after 30 or so pages I would swap the hole cutter for the next size smaller. I carried on with this process until I was down to the last hole size and as you can see, from the photo my result worked very well. It looks like the inside of the book had exploded.
This is to represent the feeling of how big the books were to me and the feeling of impossibility; to even think that I would be able to work my way through the book. In my mind I saw the book as a page after page of words that was never going to end. I could see the saying of “blood sweat and tears” being a very real possibility when it came to reading a book. This is what gave me the idea of adding ink to represent my blood. I toyed around with the idea of using black ink to represent the idea of the ink being the blood of the book, but I felt that it was the book damaging me, more than me damaging the book. I felt this way because there is 100s if not 1000s of copies of that book, yet there is only one copy of me.
It was this thought that made me go ahead and use red ink to represent me. I feel that this works and shows more of an emotional connection that I have with the work.
