The Traveling Bookbox Show

About

Dioramas, scenes-in-shoeboxes that often try to capture the essence of books, are a popular kind of elementary school project in the US. I didn’t even know what a diorama was until I moved to Northern California from London in 2011, and someone told me I make grown-up versions for a living.

In 2016 I decided to dedicate some time to this old-school art, books in boxes. I wrote a list of the books I’ve loved. I reread some, nearly ruined a few by watching the movie version, all the while looking for particular scenes and feelings that had stayed with me over the years.

In truth what often dawned, was a realisation of how wrongly I remembered the details of each book, but how truly I recalled the lasting impressions. So my slightly-wrong-book-memories have nonetheless woven their magic and meaning into the making of my worldview.

The result was the The Traveling Bookbox Show, an unusual touring art exhibition of sparkling dioramas. Debuting in San Francisco in June 2016, it has now delighted kiddies of all ages in wonderful spots around the world.

In the pipeline

My to do list:
North Woods by Daniel Mason
How to be Both by Ali Smith
The Tzar of Love and Techno Anthony Marra
Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
Howards End by E. M. Forster
My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Green
The Magus by John Fowles
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft by Thor Heyerdahl
Safari as a Way of Life by Dan Eldon
The Famous Five by Enid Blyton
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
The Man who fell in Love with the Moon by Tom Spanbauer

Wuthering Heights by Emily BrontëJane Ayre by Charlotte Brontë
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Perfect Storm by Sebastien Junger

Oscar & Lucinda

About 25 years ago, I read a single page of “Oscar and Lucinda” by Peter Carey for an A-level English Literature ‘unseen’ exam.

A life-size glass church, made by missionaries in the Australian outback, has somehow become unhinged from its foundations and is floating down a river. Trapped inside the glass cathedral is a dragonfly, colliding against the walls trying to escape, blind to the concept of glass. When I read that page more than half a lifetime ago, I recognised a parallel collision between the seriousness with which we take our life’s endeavors, and the limitations of our understanding. It stayed with me.

When I started creating worlds inside glass boxes about ten years ago, boxes you could stand both inside and outside, that embodied both vulnerability and strength, in a space that was simultaneously intimate and infinite, Peter Carey’s paragraph, from so many moons before, came to mind. And so the Glass Cathedrals name and concept was born.