Willow Winston's Installation

The artist Willow Winston designs spectacular installations involving books that will be the perfect complement to JBW’s 60th anniversary celebrations, a monument to our work over the last 60 years and a symbol of our direction for the future.

Willow Winston's past works have been exhibited in collections and museums such as the V&A and Ben Uri Gallery. She designed a stunning installation at the South Bank Centre.

Willow Winston has taught at universities, colleges and schools

on both sides of the Atlantic. She also ran a very successful workshop at JBW 2008. After dismayed initial reactions, people really enjoyed cutting, gouging and gluing books into individual works of art.

The installation will be an 8 foot high, 6 foot wide structure made of 5 towers linked together to create an open Star of David on the inside and a hexagon on the outside. The external walls will be covered with books and the inside will be bright red. It will be large enough for one or two people at a time to go inside the structure and for larger numbers to go around and examine the open books along the 15 foot length of the outside walls.

The structure symbolises the fact that the Jewish people are still in transformation, in constant flux. The open star is also an invitation to enter and encounter Jewish thoughts and ideas. The books will be chosen to reflect the huge diversity of the Jewish output over the last 60 years: - fiction, non fiction, poetry, history, children’s books, etc… There will also be books from other backgrounds, indicating that Jews and Jewish culture are woven into the fabric of this world of many peoples, not separate from it.

When coming down the escalator at Kings Place, the Star of David shape will be most visible, the top of the inside walls being decorated with gold leaf. Then closer up, the experience will change depending on whether one is outside, focusing on the outside, or inside, immersed in the red chamber. The missing point of the star will be represented by a pile of papers and people will be invited to record their reaction.

This structure - designed specifically for JBW - is really the book festival in a nutshell: beautiful, diverse, eclectic and thought-provoking. This work will not only enhance the festival visually, but also emphasise the continued potency of books in the 21st century.

This could not happen without the support of the Jewish Community Centre which will transfer the installation to its new to its home on the Finchley Road when it opens next year. For more information on the new building, click here.

YOU can help build the structure by taking part in workshops to “alter” the books going on the structure. The interventions would, on the whole, be of a gentle nature so that the books would retain their structure and could hang in the installation for the artwork to be discovered by leafing through the book.  So more drawing/painting and possibly printing would be involved, rather than the wild cutting, sewing, tearing and more sculptural effects encouraged in 2008.  The idea is to create interesting and delightful secrets within the pages of the

The workshops will be held at ORT House in Camden or Willow's studio in South Bermondsey. They will be between an hour and a half and two hour long. They are free but participants are asked to bring books. For more information, email geraldine@jewishbookweek.com

Thanks also to the Arts Council of England for their support.

Follow the building of the installation here.