Janet Jones

Many years ago I came upon some very old Chinese books in an antique store. They were tattered and crumbling, and

so worm-eaten that it was impossible to separate the pages without their disintegrating. I learned from Chinese friends that two of them were the collected sayings of Confucius and another was the earliest book of Chinese poems, dating back to at least 1,000 BC. They were in a writing style that has not been used for centuries, and clearly had been lovingly passed down through countless generations. I felt such a sense of responsibility to treat these books with the reverence they deserved that it was many years before I could bring myself to use parts of them in my work. The result is this series of collages in which I let the papers speak for themselves. I like to think that I've given them life in a new incarnation.