Interview to the artist by Rachelle Gryn Brettler, from our Anniversary Book
The first piece I created was for our first wedding anniversary. We decided to make each other paper gifts. That was an experiment made from my wife’s favourite Greek newspaper. I wanted to make a piece of jewellery so I started researching into paper jewellery but without finding anything that really caught my eye. I wanted to try something new. So, I thought about laminating.
I was a landscape architect at the time - designing parks in central London. When you are doing that, you are constantly looking and getting inspired by the environment. When you come up with an idea, nine times out of ten someone has already done it. But with this, no one had done it. I always want to experiment, I constantly want to try to find something new. My approach initially was about sustainability. I wanted to create from something that was going to waste. I was not purchasing materials. People enjoy that sort of sustainability, that they are wearing something that would have normally been destroyed.
Some clients are very attached to a particular book or story. This is encapsulating people's emotions, and passions… into one concise object, the emotional side of books.
I source my books from everywhere. I like to go to charity bookshops. People have given me a lot of books. I have Goethe, Dickens, Mozart… beautiful old Art Deco and Art Nouveau books….
When I start reading a book, I do not know what I am going to produce. I devour it. I read it completely, maybe do a some research just to fully understand the whole book. That does not always translate into the design, but I need to have some understanding of it. A book speaks to me in different ways. There are material kind of qualities - like a nice leather binding. Illustration speaks in a very obvious way. A lot of the times when I am reading, I will start to see a design, I begin to see colours as well. I start sketching and then I work around different designs in my head.
I take a book and then I cut each page individually with a scalpel, trying to keep it as precise as possible. Then I add colour. Within the story and the book, I see colours that come through. I may use coloured papers or stain the papers with paint or ink. I then laminate them, one page at a time. I have to wait for it to dry, which takes - depends on the quality of the book or paper - days, weeks. I end up with a solid block. It is slightly different to wood but very similar as well because there is a definite grain with paper. Then I start carving into it with the scalpel, and I have a Dremel, like a dentist drill. When you are actually cutting and sanding, you have to work out which way the grain is going within the book. Then I put a very thin layer of Japanese lacquer on top to make it more durable and accentuate the colours.
With each piece I am always testing myself. I do not want to reproduce a ring, a design, and I do not want to use a technique that I have used before. Maybe it is out of boredom, or maybe it is because I want to challenge myself to go further with the materials. Sometimes it does not work, so some rings can take longer than others.
With my work for jaggedart, I started testing the material and experimenting to see what would be next, I have a bit more freedom to create sculptures which I had never done before. I have a design in my head, but if it then goes in a different direction, I will just follow it. The piece is talking to me and I am working with that, I am still staying true to the story or my original vision.
As a child I was always creating, always dabbling, always making stuff. My parents were both horticulturalists and I was very comfortable around plants. I decided to be a landscape architect when I was fourteen. I was very much into art, very passionate, and even then, I was very much into paper…ripping, layering… but I could not understand that you could make a living out of art.