“What one has done artistically often becomes apparent only in retrospect. I now see that over the past twenty years I’ve been largely obsessed with torn and broken books, caught in the moment when the volume is splayed open and offering to the imagination a fragment of the lost world that was once between its covers.
In these troubled times, such savaged and gutted texts increasingly remind me what book banning means: censorship, suppression of information, and the crushing of human expression.”
—John Frederick Walker
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Artist and writer John Frederick Walker is book person, both as an author and as a visual creator using books as the primary medium for his visually and emotionally charged, 3-dimensional artworks. Lightwood visited his studio and was caught up in both his process and his finished pieces where discarded and worn books are saved from the compost pile and fire to become visual and ghostly literary objects of beauty and mystery. Visit his work on Instagram and on his website.
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Walker’s art has been exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, and is represented in private and public collections, including Yale University Art Gallery, Brooklyn Museum Library, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C.
He is the author of A Certain Curve of Horn: The Hundred-Year Quest for the Giant Sable Antelope of Angola, a narrative of his search for an endangered species in war-torn Africa, and Ivory’s Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants. His writings have appeared in The Washington Post, National Geographic News, World Policy Journal and other publications.
John Frederick Walker lives in Connecticut in the United States.
Lightwood 