Today, just in time for tomorrow’s Open Studios I completed one-of-a-kind pop-up book “Still Water”. Here are some images.

It is a fully collapsible paper structure made with collage, painting, drawing and paper engineering.

I can always hear water in Kamiyama. The rushing of the stream and the waterfalls behind my studio at Shimobun or the slow, thin trickling from the terraced rice fields, water gathering and flowing through gutters to form underground rivers. It’s so much part of my experience here that sometimes I don’t notice it anymore. Like people who have lived here all their lives told me me they do’t notice the mountains. I now make a conscious effort to hear the sound of the water, to be aware of it and not to take it for granted.

This is my book “Still Water” from above.

This is the opposite side view. The book shows a different view from every angle, there is no set front and back, important and secondary side.

Floods appear in my work quite often. One of my first memories is of the great 1970 flood in Szatmar. I was two years old.

My mother says that if you dream of floods or murky water you will be sick. Especially if you immerse yourself in it.

If there are waves like in the sea and the water is not transparent you might as well just expect the worst.

A few nights ago I dreamed of an enormous colorful tsunami wave that came from far far away so people had time to climb up leasurely onto a mountain and although it swept over us it did not harm anyone, it was slow and gentle in its coming.