It’s Earth Day and my dining table/art studio is covered with damaged and discarded books. Some of them have broken spines, others have been a canvas for crayons and stickers. Many of them have been cleared out of school libraries because they no longer meet curriculum goals, their bar codes slashed with red pen. One book was positively sodden when I pulled it from a neighborhood little free library, its pages soaked into waves.
They are, in the language of efficiency, finished. But I am not done with them.
I stack them beside scissors, glue, raffia ribbon, carboard and coffee cups. I study their wounds, test which pages still fold cleanly, which paper curls best under tension, which illustrations can be coaxed into petals. A damaged picture book becomes a spray of blossoms. A torn reader turns into leaves. A page about a wacky poodle, printed on fine quality paper, morphs into roses.
I’m building a series of flower crowns for May Day and for the upcoming Jersey Art Book Fair, where I’m delighted to be collaborating with Art Sci Now. There is something wonderfully fitting about bringing these reclaimed paper blooms into a space devoted to books, artists, and ideas. What was once headed for the discard pile now returns as ornament, play, and celebration, and a way to reconsider what is waste when it comes to books.
Millions of books are tossed out each year, and children’s books are a large part of that waste. They are often loved hard, outgrown quickly, revised out of classrooms, or deemed too worn for resale or donation. Many end up pulped, recycled, or in landfill systems alongside other paper goods. Yet children’s books also tend to be made with surprising durability: sturdy stock, coated pages, rich color printing, glossy finishes, papers designed to survive sticky fingers and repeated readings.
For an artist, that material quality tells another story. Those same thick, luminous pages hold shape beautifully. They curl into petals, catch light, and carry color in ways plain paper cannot. What was manufactured to endure a child’s imagination can, with a second life, endure mine as well.
One of my mottos in life is “wear things on your head”. Hats and caps are sensory tools for me, helping me feel more contained. But I also think of hats, bonnets, caps, crowns, and fascinators as part of the language of attire. They are punctuation marks of personality, declarations of wit or seriousness. To relinquish hats from our wardrobe feels, to me, a little like deciding to eliminate adverbs, or retiring delicious irregular words like “sodden” (see above). Why surrender such expressive possibilities when they still have so much to say?
And so it feels especially right to spend Earth Day at this table, scissors in hand, glue gun at the ready as I turn what was cast aside into something celebratory. Each flower crown feels like a small argument against disposability and a vote for imagination. On a day devoted to the planet, I can think of few better rituals than making art from what was garbage.
